The Black Neon's debut album, Arts and Crafts, is a strong, sometimes quite exciting release that successfully blends sounds and styles and comes out sounding unique. Heavily influenced by the progressive and electronic sounds coming out of Germany in the '70s (Can, Kraftwerk, Neu!), the Black Neon also rope in elements of space rock, indie pop, indie techno, and straight-ahead rock. Welding hooky pop tunes onto repetitive, almost avant-garde structures is nothing new, but the man behind the Black Neon, Steve Webster, does it with style and a nearly perfect sense of arrangement. The blend of vintage electronic instruments and "real" instruments gives the record a very warm sound, and Webster knows when to let the songs drift into repetitive territory and when to rein them in and let the hooks take effect. A track like "Cast That Light" is a fine example of his skillful sound sculpting, and so is "Hollywood, 1, 2, & 3." Webster and the Black Neon show their versatility by dipping into singer/songwriter territory on the tale of love in the German Army "Ralph and Barbara," lay down some heavy rock grooves ("TX81Z"), and uncannily re-create the sound of '70s Germany ("Ode to Immer Weider"). They even get kind of epic in a low-key and squelchy way on the album's emotional high point, "The Ghosts." Only the couple of tracks that veer too far into too-traditional rock posturing fail; "The Truth," for example, rides a workaday riff for too long and his distorted vocals sound too Beck-ish to be original. Still, these are only a couple of weak moments on a record that promises very interesting things to come from the Black Neon camp in the future. ~ Tim Sendra, Rovi