Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy

Music | September 3rd, 2015

A few years ago, in a now-famous appearance on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” comedian Louis C.K. went on a tangent that decried us as a society for griping about our #firstworldproblems. In the skit, he claimed that “everything is amazing, and nobody’s happy,” pointing out that we’re more irritated that we can’t reliably get Wi-Fi on a plane than we are astounded by the mere fact that we have pocket-sized devices that allow us to speak, in real time, to somebody a world away.

This sentiment is echoed, albeit much more darkly, in “Personal Computer,” the electro-funk debut from New Zealand’s Silicon. The album owes its binary-code bump to Daft Punk and Alan Turing in equal measures, though its multi-instrumentalist mastermind Kody Nielson sounds more concerned with passing Turing’s namesake AI test than getting lucky.

The creeping of robotic influence into our stream of pop music until now has been fairly innocent: Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” inspired far more lame dancing than it did social commentary, and T-Pain’s Auto-Tuned pleas of stripper love suggested android libido rather than artificial intelligence. Explicitly bookended by a robotic, text-to-speech recitation (“Never be lonely/personal computer/someone that’s listening/personal computer”), the album is an icily detached observation of modern technology’s stranglehold on our socialization. With spiritual forebears in the techno-dystopia of “Brave New World” and media theorist Neil Postman’s paranoid prophecy, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” “Personal Computer” is unsettling in its directness, both thematically and audibly.

Much of the album is claustrophobically rendered without so much as a pang of reverb, an aesthetic decision that pushes each instrument unnervingly to the front of the mix. It’s no coincidence that Nielson’s arid production is especially jarring to those listening in earbuds, as airtight passages buzz directly into the eardrums with inhuman ignorance. While some albums claim to be most deserving of play-through on 180g vinyl, “Computer” may be best experienced as a stream of digitally compressed mp3s, if only to drive home the intentional irony.

Despite the irreverence in the naming of some of the tracks (“God Emoji,” the Y2K-nostalgic “Little Dancing Baby”), Nielson daringly subverts the electronica tag to point out the little dysfunctions spurred on by the so-called Communication Revolution. Interwoven with snippets of a recorded phone call to an emergency responder, “Cellphone” makes for a particularly disturbing listen. Nielson’s airy falsetto winds through the grainy phone recording and threadbare synth-funk.

Poppy enough for its underlying message of futility to be glossed over even after several spins, album standout “Burning Sugar” most closely mirrors Louis C.K.’s bewilderment, as Nielson sings exactly about taking “too much for granted like it’s none of my concern.”

What may be the album’s most cleverly subversive moments come near the end of “Submarine,” when the initially-relieving sounds of birds chirping reveal themselves to be synthetic imitations of the calls, forcing a consideration as to how much of the album, if any, was made outside the confines of Neilson’s laptop.

Harrowing and hardwired, Silicon’s debut is a frighteningly upfront comment on our society’s under-amazement, though Neilson refuses to let “Personal Computer”’s thematic content eclipse the deep grooves of its robotic funk.

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