As future robot historians will inevitably note, a plague swept through the society of machines in the third millennium. In chillwave and drag house, in post-dubstep and R&B, in neo-IDM and electronic psychedelia, palsied drum machines lurched and staggered. Ailing synths with gummy keys coughed out sickly pitches. As the precision of machines tightened around us, we forced them to be everything that didn't come naturally to them: faulty, erratic, human. But the robots decisively rally on the new album by 120 Days, where an armada of hardware fires on all circuits, larger than life and possibly out for revenge.
120 Days II is contiguous with the Norwegian electro-rockers' eponymous 2006 record, where they built the gleaming chrome architecture of optimistic krautrockers such as Neu! on the scorched earth of nihilistic droners Spacemen 3. But this time, the emphasis is definitely on the electro side, as announced by opening track "Spacedoubt", where a discreetly grinding guitar is dwarfed by a glowing, rippling grid straight out of Jan Hammer. Throughout the record, rapacious currents of house and trance, blasted out with pre-minimal Teutonic bluster, relegate the guitar to a more supportive role. The drums thunder along on motorik rails, but they're intricately syncopated with miles of arpeggiated synthesizer. 120 Days aren't just pulling this stuff off a spool. Instead, they tie space into strange loops and curves, fanciful and whooshing like baroque banisters. Which is a relief, since it took them six years to make.
120 Days are attracted to some of the same tropes as their countrymen Casiokids: the oily skid of a bass synthesizer, the tropical melody couched in a wintry timbre. But where Casiokids are all light and fun and humility, 120 Days are much darker and grander; a jam band for stern-faced MPC wizards. But for all their hellbent grandiosity, they think to provide a little something for everybody. Like to hear tensions gathered and discharged at great, spine-tingling length? There's "Dahle Disco", a lunging house track wrapped in a growling and shimmering FX fantasia. Prefer to dive into the rainbow? "Lucid Dreams Part 1" is a pleasantly streaky drone interstitial. Fiery prog, pitch-shifting bass workouts, dreamy interludes; they're all here, finely sequenced into one mammoth arc. The dark euphoria notably dips on "Sleepless Nights #4", a Beatles-y longueur, but it gets fizzy again on "Sunkissed", where popping bubbles serve as a delightful and untypically delicate kind of percussion.
The machines on 120 Days II are so holographically vivid that the human element can't help but seem wan, especially since Ådne Meisfjord is such a nondescript singer whose vocal presence does neither harm nor good. The exception to the rule is closing track "Osaka". With nasty synthesizers hammering away at snarled boasts such as "5:15, I'm sharp and clean," it's like the Strokes as Scandinavian electro-rockers, and has tons of the personality lacking elsewhere. Still, it's not just the record's title that smacks of an underdeveloped conceptual imagination, however well-compensated by a robust technical one. Though it's a ripping good time, this Krauty idiom already has the propensity to feel dated. Such a towering and square-cornered version feels especially so, in this time of mechanical plague.
