An intense and melodramatic, if uneven, effort from ‘the next David Bowie.’

The press release billed Berlin's Tim Exile as the next David Bowie, and to be fair, as I listened to the early 1980s style-electronic rhythms of lead-off track “Don't Think We're One,” I could easily imagine Exile jerking around onstage like a kabuki-obsessed Let's Dance-era Bowie. I also wondered if there might be some sort of conceptual performance piece that had failed to be captured in the transition to the recorded album.

After touring with the likes of Hot Chip and The Bug, Exile is like the kid who gets invited to all the cool parties, but is never sure why and tries very hard to justify his presence. At times, the songs are intense and melodramatic, so much so, that on “There's Nothing Left of Me But Her and This” you question whether it's tongue-in-cheek. Other songs, like “YY,” have a very definite cerebral humour about them, quite similar to Canada's own Wax Mannequin.

Exile has wonderful production skills, splicing songs like “Family Galaxy” so that it becomes a true multi-channel stereo experience with individual words and sounds bouncing around from one speaker position to another. In effect, that would be the chief criticism here: Exile thinks too much about the music, lyrically there's too much tell and not enough show, and the words fail to be as interesting as the compositions.