The Home of Easy Credit "The Feast of the Meal Replacement Bars"

The Home of Easy Credit is the eponymous debut recording from husband and wife team Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen and Tom Blancarte. Taking their name from a department store sign in a dilapidated section of downtown Houston, Texas (Blancarte's native state), the duo draw their inspiration from the gradual awareness of the decline of civilization which permeates our culture. Hailing from a remote rural region of Denmark, Jensen uses subtle and not-so-subtle electronics to blend her vocal, saxophone and flute work with Tom Blancarte's furious bass playing, creating one of the most unique sound worlds in contemporary music. Featuring tortured sonic landscapes that conjure up Stockhausen and Feldman as readily as Björk or Mike Patton, their debut on Northern Spy Records is a mediation on the bleakness of modern America and the western world in general. The album contains a tightly-constructed musical narrative; five short auditory haikus named for permutations of the American Dream posited by Ted Ownby are interspersed between longer, open-form pieces whose titles reference cubicles, the dark side of Frank Lloyd Wright and the books of Michael Pollan and James Howard Kunstler, among other subjects. The Home of Easy Credit paints a musical portrait of a commercialized and homogenized consumer culture that is slowly waking up to realize that it is completely fucked.