Hometown: London.
The lineup: Christopher "Toph" Taylor (vocals, instruments, programming).
The background: Trouble Over Tokyo is the alter ego of Toph Taylor, a 28-year-old from the suburbs of South London and unlikely star of the Austrian indie scene who had an idea - and it's a great one - to merge indie at its most apprehensive and introspective with R&B at its most modernistic and manically twitchy. On his first widely available album Pyramides, issued by Vienna's Klein imprint, the bedsit solipsist gets his geek on: a self-confessed control freak, he wrote, arranged, produced, and performed every note of the 10 songs himself, handling the guitars, pianos, strings and drum machines; he even drew the artwork and designed the CD box. The result is an album of angsty electronica, sung by Taylor in a mainly falsetto voice that, usefully, simultaneously recalls Thom Yorke at his most existentially anxious and Justin Timberlake at his most sexually rapacious. The near-title track of the album - Pyramids - is a hyper-ballad that does indeed sound like a Warped Jeff Buckley, or, say, Cry Me A River performed by a Timberlake who grew up with Yorke's sense of unease and krautrock albums, a Timberlake who then went on to make records for German experimental electronic music label Mille Plateaux. Or, to put it another way, as a startled reviewer recently put it, "imagine Kid A produced by Basement Jaxx".
Actually, sometime B Jaxx singer Milly Blue adds ghostly guest warbles to one of the LP's songs, 4,228, a tale of transatlantic love gone disastrously wrong. The other titles of the tracks on Pyramides offer further clues as to the state of mind of this suburban boy who wrote his first song when he was five and, aged seven, fell under the spell created by Quincy Jones on those Michael Jackson classics of neurotic disco, Off The Wall, Thriller and, especially, Bad. Of those titles, Save Us, The Liar, Washing Away The Dirt, My Anxiety and The Dark Below (Oh ... My God) particularly give the impression of someone who's either had incredible bad luck with women, or simply has an overactive imagination and is attracted by the notion of the lonely cyber miserabilist.
The buzz: "Like Sufjan Stevens discovered electro music under the influence of Matthew Dear."
The truth: It's not quite in the same league as Vulnerabilia, the astonishing 2002 debut album of wan songtronica by defunct Manchester duo My Computer ... but as digital melancholia goes, it's pretty good.
Most likely to: Wear thin after a while.
Least likely to: Wear lederhosen by the Nile.
What to buy: Pyramides is released by Klein on June 16.
File next to: Thom Yorke, My Computer, Junior Boys, Mew.
Links: www.myspace.com/troubleovertokyo
Tomorrow's new band: ManMan.
