Johnson's gift was making art and torment and inaccessibility accessible with The The. Before that gift was properly realized, however, he produced Burning Blue Soul in which nervous self-awareness, disorienting loops, and arty percussion were met with a punkish disregard for pop structures, and a half-assed psychedelic haze tied together disparate ideas and genres. It's a paranoid mess which for all its eccentricities manages to feel monochromatic, it's expressionistic but too planned and analytic to convey anything other than said self-awareness and paranoia, and it somehow manages to turn experimentation into tedium. Maybe if I hadn't started my day with twee pop I'd be more appreciative of his gloomy post-punk defiance, but I think it all just works better restricted to a pop framework- he writes a killer song when he wants to, and his pains and frustrations are more potent when they border on catchy
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