The Null Device Blog

It took BT 4 years to write and record “These Hopeful Machines”, and it’s easy to see why.  Aside from his turbulent personal and professional crises – the multiple robberies of his gear, the custody battle and subsequent abduction of his daughter – the album is a huge, sprawling affair.  Two 50-minute discs (or “Sides” as he terms them) of precision-sculpted electronic pop and dance music pretty much summarize everything BT is all about, and the sheer amount of labor involved in the editing and sequencing of the music is impressive.  The album is a mixture of electronic rock, pop music sensibilities, straight-up dance music, and experimental sound design, and is pretty much the embodiment of the BT ethos.  That ethos of hyper-detailed programming both helps and hinders his work – on the one hand, few artists are that ambitious and even fewer can pull off an engaging song with things like raindrops quantized down to the 2048th-note level, but at the same time some songs can feel like they’ve had the fun and spontaneity micro-edited right out of them.  This was more of a problem on his previous pop effort, “Emotional Technology” than it is here, simply because the songs on THM are stronger than on large portions of ET.

The digital marketing of this album has frankly been a bit baffling.  In an effort to return listeners to “the album experience”, the itunes and amazon versions of These Hopeful Machines comes as two 50-minute tracks.   While it’s laudable that as an artist he’s insistent  in his artistic vision, it feels a little misguided.  For one thing, there were few albums that ran 50 minutes a side back in the glory days of the LP.  Additionally, these are still essentially distinct pop songs, and despite a continuous mix, there’s no obvious need for a complete lack of track breaks, especially given that digital music can be gaplessly played back, and that one of digital music’s strengths is that the song information can be embedded in the track itself.  One 50 minute track doesn’t indicate easily where one song begins and ends, and while that may be partially the point of his single-track efforts, even the LP had band indicators so the listener at least had a reference.  (As an aside, I got around this by importing the files into my studio software and splitting them into the individual tracks).  As it stands, it’s like listening on cassette – you’re pretty much stuck rewinding and fast-forwarding to get to a specific point in the album, and while BT may want you to listen to the whole thing, it’s a good bet that not everybody is going to want to listen for 45 minutes to get to the one song they like.  A multi-track version is supposedly available, but neither iTunes, Amazon, nor eMusic seem to have it, leaving those who’ve abandoned the physical CD little of the consumer choice that’s coming to define the modern music industry.

The cover art is a little strange too.  It’s apparently a huge oil painting, and on the CD and the accompanying singles, the detail is visible, rendering the whole thing a Bosch-gone-to-Ibiza feel.  Digitally, though, only the front panel is visible, which is just a painting of  an anime-haired BT surrounded by roses, which in isolation looks a bit like something you’d find drawn in an artistically-talented 11th-grader’s notebook.  Thankfully, cover art is rarely the defining aspect of any album.

Disc one kicks off with “Suddenly” which is another in BT’s continuing efforts to make synthesized pop music rock out.  The programming on it is unsurprisingly beautiful, intricate and detailed.  Everything from the chunky guitars to the zillions of vocal layers is microquantized and digitally edited, and sounds pristine.  That’s both the song’s genius and its ultimate downfall – it’s sort of the Platonic Ideal of an electronic rock song – it’s a bit too clinical in many ways to really rock.  From an electronic standpoint, though, there’s a dizzying array of hooks, coming at the listener from various places in the soundfield.   It might not be a headbanging anthem, but it’s never a dull song.

From there, the more traditional dance music kicks in – The Emergency, Light in Things and Rose of Jericho all feature a more standard trance beat, but this being a BT record it is also filled with sweeping ambient passages and granular soundscapes.  Rose of Jericho is a deceptively complex song, which at first listen sounds like a standard tech-trance track but once again there’s a few thousand super-edited things going on in the background.    The non-dance track “Every Other Way”, featuring Jes (formerly of trance hitmakers Motorcycle) is a more subdued affair, although it too is filled with electronic craziness percolating just below the calm pop-ballad surface.  Disc one finishes off with another synth-rock track – this one a little less overwrought than “Suddenly.”  The song closes out with BT’s 5-year old daughter singing the main melody, which is touching if you’re familiar with the family backstory, but if you aren’t it could come off as a bit bewilderingly precious.

Disc two features the pre-requisite appearance by Kristy Hawkshaw – I think there’s a requirement in every major-label dance music contract that specifies at least one Hawkshaw guest vocal.  It’s a more straightforward trance track, and likely to be the one that shows up on every “Trance Smashes 2010″ and “Ministry of Ultra Ibiza” compilation this year.   “A Million Stars” hits every major trance note – the angelic vocals, slightly nonsensical lyrics, 4-on-the-floor beats, breakdowns/buildups and enormous hands-in-the-air club hooks.  Oh, and the 12-minute running time.  It’s still clearly a BT song, but it’s one of his less dramatically trademarked tracks.

“Love Can Kill You” is another electro-rock anthem attempt, and suffers from the same over-egged pudding problem as “Suddenly.”  ”Always” features Catherine Wheel frontman Rob Dickinson, which gives the track some rock bona fides, and while the track is again quantized within a sample frame of its life, Dickinson’s voice has a more emotive edge than BT’s, and the wild electronic effects settle more comfortably behind the singer, rather than dominating the song.  It’s a strong candidate for the most radio friendly single on the album.

Despite the title, “Le Nocturne de Lumiere” is not an ambient ballad, but a surprisingly aggressive dance track.  A heavy thumping beat is paired with bouncy glitched synths.  There’s not a whole lot in the way of explicit melody – you can tell there’s a song in there someplace but it’s been granularized and hocketed to the point where the listener is left to fill in the blanks.   It works surprisingly well, and there’s some nice ambient textures in there as well.  It’s as if he took “Flaming June” and ran it through an electric fan (Until it briefly switches to 6/8 time at about the 7 minute mark, which would be the place where everyone on the dance floor either really grooves out or falls over).  Rob Dickinson shows up again on “The Unbreakable” which starts out subdued, and slowly builds to a more epic track, again walking a finely balanced line between a rock song and an electronic dance track.

Everything closes out with an unusual twist – a cover of Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You.”  It’s a quiet, intricate affair, luckily not over-produced (although the occasional granular tweak shows up).  It’s a nice, chilled way to end the album.

Overall, it’s hard to find much fault in this album in terms of its ambition or technical prowess.  While some in the press are hailing the album as some sort of groundbreaking bridge between experimental electronic music and accessible pop, it’s not quite to that point.  The album is still heavily geared towards the dance music audience, and isn’t going to somehow become this Prokofiev-like monument of avant-garde music, especially since a lot of its electronic avant-garde-ness tends to erase the kinds of song elements that help embed a song in the pop music canon (would “Smells Like Teen Spirit” have been a monster hit if the signature guitar riff were ultra-quantized and overdubbed 20 times?)    That said, it’s loaded with pop hooks, even those mangled and twisted by bleeding-edge software.  At the very least, this album will stand as a peak in BT’s development as an artist.  Only time will tell if this is some sort of first shot fired in a software-as-instrument revolution, or simply a refinement of BT’s particular sound.