Blogarhythms

So far this week’s class of Blogarhythms graduates has included a “keyboard band” that doesn’t play “robot music” and a couple of True-School Hip-Hop revivalists who added synthesizers to their arsenal without sounding like the latest retro-electro bandwagon jumpers. And although one of the latter asked us to “Do the Robot In Cyberspace,” their version of “the robot” was more break-boy traditionalist than sci-fi futuristic.

Today, the robots are rebelling against their human masters and taking over completely. This time they’re gonna do things their way. And I couldn’t be happier.

I almost fronted on Picking a Lock At the Speed of Light, the newly released sophomore album from Saint Paul/Minneapolis, Minnesota-based These Modern Socks, when I saw it sitting in a pile of “to-be-played” CD’s on the mixing console during my radio-station homie The Spaceman’s radio show this weekend. The cover-art looked exactly like what I’d expect a CD from an awesome robot band to look like, which usually means the band in question is actually something else entirely, so I let it sit where it was. Then The Spaceman played “No One’s Gonna Miss Me,” the album’s opening track, and I knew I needed a copy of this album.

These Modern Socks “No One’s Gonna Miss Me”

Built on a propulsive loop of an old-school drum-machine stacked high with layers of electric piano, synths and silky guitar, “No One’s Gonna Miss Me” sounded like a lost Postal Service b-side. The likeness to Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello’s side-project was due in no small part to bandleader and lead vocalist Corey Palmer’s heart-string-tugging narrative lyricism and sensitive singing style, but the album opener’s instrumentalism didn’t hurt either.

Elsewhere the group, which is in fact a five-man unit, indulges in more traditionally “bandy” sounds, striking a balance between spacey ’70s Prog-Rock, Power-Pop & soulful Soft-Rock, ’80s New Wave and today’s Pop-Punk and electro-acoustic Emotronic, but always under a haze of electronically generated tones or with the assistance of electronic effects. So other standouts like “Space Bars,” “Escape Pod,” “Wooden,” “To Nasa,” “On the Moon” and the vocoderized title track sound something like Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, The Cars, the Mobius Band and Gibbard’s band Death Cab for Cutie meeting with a Morr Music A&R over glasses of blue milk at the Tatooine Cantina.

Ann Arbor, Michigan’s Joey Sims, also known as JDSY, makes electro-acoustic music too, but his only bandmate is technology. I was engrossed by the young producer/vocalist’s Ghostly International debut Adage of Known from the start, as hi-hats sizzled beneath a big reverb-drenched piano before breaking out into a Dubstep-esque stomp of drums, pings and whomping bass on album-opener “Else 2.” Then the track broke again, the piano twisted playfully, dude started to sing, and I could only think “Oh, this is what that Cassettes Won’t Listen kid’s music would sound like if he were actually signed to Def Jux and El-P was producing his album.”

Well, Sims’ voice sticks to a lower register than Jason Drake’s, but you get the idea.

JDSY “Else 2″

Songs like “Osah,” “Staircase,” “The Beetle,” “Drifter,” “Horizon Line,” and “My Garage” fit the chunk and thump of Hip-Hop beats, the jitter, twitch and glitch of IDM, Lap-Pop & even Drum-n-Bass, and the mechanical noise & melody of Krautrock, Prog-Rock and four decades of Electronica together like a puzzle, with Sims absent-mindedly singing, melancholic and near psychedelic, to himself over it all. Like the aforementioned “Else 2” songs like “Sabateur” and “The Asp” flirt with the nervous, bass-heavy sound of UK Dubstep and Grime, with the middle of “Sabateur” flipping a jumpy Dancehall-influenced rhythm that sounds like Thom Yorke doing an Industrial/Carribean mashup thing and “The Asp” coming off like the bastard-child of Burial’s Untrue and Skream & Plastician’s remix of Black Ghosts’ “Some Way Through This.”

I mentioned it a while back, but if you haven’t downloaded it already, JDSY also has a track (the Kraftwerk-esque “All Shapes”) on Ghostly Swim, the free label compilation released by Ghostly International in conjunction with the people at Adult Swim. So go get that shit!

Oh, and speaking of free stuff, Tone Tank of Blogarhythms favorites Iller Than Theirs and the Nuclear Family is giving away a six-track EP called The Black Six Sessions which is pretty damm boss. It’s built around samples from Hardcore Punk records, so it doesn’t really fit in with today’s robot theme. But it’s free. And Tone looks like a pretty tough guy, so if I had to put together a team of mercenaries to fight a robot uprising I’d probably get at him to be a member.