Had I not been assigned this oddly beguiling album, I probably would have avoided it due to its title and artist name.Woods of Broccoli, indeed. The photo of broccoli on the cover would have been enough to make me turn away. A pretentious album? A silly album? One might certainly get that impression – but one (okay, I) would be flat-out wrong.

It took me a while to figure out what was going on here. I checked out the YouTube video of the title track: a work which looked and sounded like the recent Mark Templeton/aA Munson collaboration. The video began with sepia tones, repeated images from home movies, an achingly flirtatious look from a young woman on a bicycle. But then everything went green, then blue, and the video plunged into the stunning field of backwards, slow-motion nature photography, reminiscent of the closing credits of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”. So what in the world was going on here? Who was this Benjamin Finger, and why had I never heard of his director, Frank Finger? (Yes, that’s apparently a real name.)

Turns out Finger is one-half of Beneva Vs. Clark Nova, although one might never be able to tell from this recording, a languid, sedate and beatless affair. This explains the quality. As to the sound – perhaps Benjamin simply needed a break. And what a lovely break it is. Lonely piano and guitar motifs wander around the speakers like curious children, occasionally joined by disjointed, cow-jumped-over-the-moon vocals. Fellow Norwegian Therese Aune lends her voice on a couple tracks, sounding like a slightly more-in-control Stina Nordenstam, especially on “Little Sparkling Mist”, which follows in the footsteps of “Little Star”. None of the vocal tracks are linear, verse-chorus-verse affairs, which lends the project an impressionistic quality; and the Finger's slightly detached strumming pays homage to shoegaze. Odd little noises trip in and out of the mix, like the toy xylophone of “Throat Traveled Yellow Hiii.” Echoes and reverberations shuffle notes from foreground to background throughout, while many shyer sounds hide in the nooks and crannies. Inga Lill (from Children and Corpse Playing in the Streets) also sings – okay, imitates a cat – on “Cat Yowled Weak Jaws,” which also features backwards-masking, a news announcer and something that sounds like a sitar.

Is this your cup of tea? Well, at this point you’ve probably either stopped reading or are saying, “You had me at cat imitation.” This is obviously not an album for everybody. And it is definitely not something one can easily recommend to Beneva Vs. Clark Nova fans. But it is certainly an original album, and a fun one – neither pretentious nor silly, and having naught to do with broccoli. In fact, the only broccoli references I can glean from this production are that it does possess a slightly childlike quality (and many people associate broccoli with childhood) and that as a critic, I can echo the words of our parents and say, “Eat this, it’s good for you.”

-Richard Allen