The Robot Ate Me
Fri March 25
Solid State
898 SE Ash
Okay, so to start things off, we’re toe-tapping to an upbeat ragtime 78 LP while gleefully gussying up for a multi-national genocide ball. Along the way, we: sneak a brief glimpse of what appears to be the son of God fucking Adolf Hitler in the back of a steam-filled car; hear a heavy-handed propaganda commercial for something called the “Republican Army”; pause for a convoluted playtime with Barbie, George Bush, and God; nap conveniently through the Holocaust; and then finally decide to scrap all of our plans for a sunny, stress-free holiday. And we’re only at halftime. This is the kind of record that optimistic people might call “challenging.” Very optimistic people.
With their sophomore full-length (recently reissued by 5RC) On Vacation, San Diego’s otherwise unassuming three-piece The Robot Ate Me have managed to create one of the most consistently frustrating pop albums I’ve ever weathered. Split indulgently into two disparate 20-minute volumes, On Vacation begins as a compelling pastiche of coarse, artfully mingled samples culled from what sound like pre-WWII pop LPs–collages that are then seamlessly augmented by indistinguishable live instrumentation into a subtly absorbing decoupage. This ambitious introduction proves deceptively promising, however–a misunderstanding that’s quickly cleared up the minute vocalist Ryland Bouchard opens his mouth. Throughout On Vacation‘s desperately over-reaching first half, Bouchard lazily struggles to contrast images of Nazi Germany with ham-fisted, offensively glib allusions to modern conservatism and the religious right. At just over the 20-minute mark, the band seems to realize that they’ve run their convoluted concept well into the ground, and decides rather randomly to trade it in for a considerably less laborious pop record–feebly uniting the two with seemingly unrelated twin title tracks. And from the onset of disc two, The Robot Ate Me miraculously transforms from over-extended experimental pop band to an adept, safe-as-milk indierock machine–a little on the bland side, sure, but at least engaging, and more importantly, within the band’s reach.
Still, it’s this mutual disparity between the discs that’s ultimately so frustrating: on one side, you’ve an oppressively clunky concept record atop a really interesting musical premise; on the other, you’ve got skillfully crafted pop songs over relatively vanilla indierock. Properly blended, On Vacation could have been one of this year’s most compelling records–but deliberately estranged as they are, it’s just terribly exasperating.