Review:
I Robot
By Joe Fernbacher
I Robot is a blood banquet for automatons that is infused with the airy,
romantic sentimentalism of pop music. The contradiction works well up to
a point: it takes the coldbloodedness our of the synthesizer's greasy moan
and adds a bit of humanism to it. But the final result is a tantara for
the ultimate sensuality of the technocratic brat and his hardware.
Most scaramouchs of the synthesizer tend to become a bit overbearing
simply because they lack an honest understanding of machine texturing--a
kind of understanding that Eno, Lou Reed and Philip Glass have turned into
exciting excursions into the soul of modern music. Not so with Parsons,
perhaps because he arranges and produces the damn things instead of
playing them.
In this enthusiastic combination of Cageian threnody, Ligeti-like choral
megillahs and futuristic insanities of Magma's "Ork Alarm," we roam from
the shapeless chaos of "The Voice" and "Nucleus" to the pop glissades of
"Some Other Time" and "Don't Let It Show." The most infectious track is
"Day after Day (The Show Must Go On)," a spontaneous excursion into
optimism and urban boredom
What all this boils down to is that I Robot is a rose amid the
concrete gray of the Metropolis.
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