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The Parallax View | Max Tundra hopes the public hasn’t been too dumbed down by Lily Allen to appreciate his ambitious new disc.

MAX TUNDRA
w/ Junior Boys. Starlite Room (10030–102 St). Tue, Apr 7 (8pm). Tickets: $17, available through Megatunes, Blackbyrd, Listen, and www.ticketweb.ca.

It took Max Tundra a full six years to finish his new album, but Parallax Error Beheads You is no Chinese Democracy for the indie pop set, perpetually overthought and second-guessed, languishing half-finished in some vault. Tundra (real name Ben Jacobs) may have had some writer’s block along the way, as well as the occasional fear that he’d die before the album was finished, but mostly he had work to do — exhaustive, painstaking work.

“There’s a track called ‘Orphaned,’ and that’s got something like 540 samples on it,” Jacobs says over the phone from his house in London. “Obviously that took a few weeks to assemble, from, I think, 30 different records. I managed to find 540 noises that were in the key I wanted.

“I really indulge myself. It’s a sunny day outside, all your friends are playing, and you’re inside chopping up drum sounds. You think, ‘What’s going on?’ But it’s worth it, because I made a record I’m extremely proud of. I couldn’t have done it in five years; it had to take six.”

That obsessive attention to (and love of) detail shows in every second of Jacobs’ work. He specializes in huge collages of sound, chopping and layering all kinds of instruments, old and new, over top of one another, and his songs are unpredictable in the best way: they rush off in new directions at the drop of a hat, with his airtight melodies and playfully obtuse lyrics leading the charge.

But despite a loyal fanbase and more than his share of critical buzz on the Internet, Jacobs is frustrated at how difficult it’s been to get the time of day from mainstream media. To make things worse, on the day we spoke, the United Kingdom officially blocked its citizens from watching music videos from YouTube, thereby taking away one of Jacobs’s biggest promotional outlets in his home country.

“Have you heard of Lily Allen?” he asks. “She’s a famous person’s daughter who writes very simplistic kinds of pop songs, but is phenomenally hyped. Other stuff isn’t getting through. There’s so many interesting people making music at the moment, and there’s blanket coverage of really bland, mainstream stuff just because it’s got a mouthy singer who might be bitching about someone.

“It’s frustrating as a practitioner of slightly weird pop music. You think, ‘There’s no way of my stuff getting heard short of word of mouth, and playing shows every day for the rest of my life.’ And even then, there’s hundreds and hundreds of people who’d probably really love it, but don’t get the opportunity to even know it exists.”

Ironically, the best summation of Jacobs’ critique of the British music scene is in the very thing they’ve just lost access to: a music video. The clip for “Will Get Fooled Again” takes his story about looking for love on the Internet — his hapless narrator finds girls through Friendster, MySpace, Google Image Search, and EBay — and puts it in the mouth of a bland-looking boy band. Then, just as the lyrics are about to start, the camera zooms way in on the frontman’s face and Jacobs, dressed up as an exploding zit, does the actual singing.

“When I recorded that song, I wanted it to be my boy band tune,” he explains. “I always think when I listen to my songs, ‘Oh yeah, this is really commercial,’ and then it fails to get on a Ford commercial. So perhaps it isn’t. But in my world, that’s a really mainstream pop song.”

Sigh. Mine too, Mr. Jacobs. Mine too.