P*P – Toca Loca (Centrediscs)

***½

There’s no shortage of amusing gambits on this album by Toronto trio Toca Loca, of composed responses to all things pop. Aaron Gervais’s Shoot Like a Film Star animates a snippet of junk e-mail text with energetic flourishes of voice and instruments (pianos and percussion), reinventing Dada for the spam age. Andrew Staniland’s Made in China worries over small musical aggregates while we soak in a phrase that contains a world of consumer goods. Juliet Palmer’s Five riffs on a song by Alanis Morissette, sending up pop’s insistence on repetition by writing canons that step on each other’s heels. Nicole Lizée’s Promises, Promises is a slippery, sharp-edge rumination on the passage of stylistic time, while other composers cut and rearrange elements of pop song structure. Nobody can resist the urge to complicate pop, though what would be really interesting would be to write something that’s as simple as pop, but that says more. R.E.-G.

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