Unless you're one of those easeful folks who can just readily access/appreciate "fun" without overthinking, Robots in Disguise open up an abyss of compromises. To offer a personal example: I've always been a righteous objector to crushing on bands, yet I'm totally schoolyard-smitten with this duo. Which is weird, because I've historically found self-exploitative peek-a-boo sexuality to be the pinnacle of tackiness, and lo, these girls have upped the soft-porn cover-art ante from their last album (which featured pretty much just their asses in tight jeans) by appearing topless in body paint. But, hey, in interviews they're well stoked about feminism and equality…
It gets much worse. I mean, their moniker comes from the old Transformers catchphrase, but they mostly do mindless retro right. They're completely derivative, but of dozens of great bands. They're conspicuously mode-ish, but they've been clattering around since way back in 2000. They embrace meta-tropes and inside gags, but their performances are so committed that they somehow transcend novelty trappings. (Gawd, that makes them sound like Electric Six.) They have fake names-- Dee Plume and Sue Denim-- that translate to "fake names." (Drumwork, human and otherwise, gets credited to Ann Droid, hardy-har-barf.) As if they weren't already at risk of being considered a spoof band, they've performed as a more satirically electro-trash version of themselves called Kraftwerk Orange on Britcom The Mighty Boosh. (Plume's even a UK tabloid bit-player as a result of dating Boosh star Noel Fielding, while Denim's romantically linked with their producer, Sneaker Pimp Chris Corner).
So yeah, a pic of one of them in a diamond-checkered bodysuit is my pathetic bachelor-pad desktop background (and I can't even deal with that press photo floating around, the one with the chinstraps and the biting each other). Plus: I'll admit that this record is abysmally sequenced-- the weakest tracks are the tinnier-than-tinny opener and the how-dare-they closer; "We're in the Music Biz" is a self-deprecating bit about, you know, being a band, while "Don't Copy Me" is way audacious coming from ladies whose sound is about original as Skechers' shoe designs. Ah, but everything in between yields some great rewards. The multivalent "Can't Stop Getting Wasted" and "The Sex Has Made Me Stupid" are Hold-Steady-caliber in their roles as both hell-raising party anthems and hungover lifestyle warnings. (I'd go so far as to say that the brilliantly simplistic, irresistibly catchy, and comprehensively remorseful "Sex" is the most tragic absentee from Pitchfork's Top Tracks of 2007.)
New single "The Tears" is an angular, jokeless threat-vamp that cribs from Joy Division's "She's Lost Control" (which Robots already snaked on 2005's "Turn It Up"). "I Don't Have a God" conflates sexual and spiritual tension as stirringly as Madonna's "Like a Prayer", or Linda Sundblad's churchy masturbation-apology "Oh Father". Meanwhile, "I'm Hit" boasts a monster bassline, evoking a super-Anglo CSS. So, as much as one might conceive of oneself as inured to the appeal of bratty, sneering fashionistas copping gram-bags of everything vogue, from no-wave to dance-punk, Robots in Disguise stake out some middle ground between obnoxious and hot, grating and seductive, escapist and sober.
And that's despite intervals that sound like Stereo Total or the Runaways at their worst. The undertone of loss and accountability throughout this album refutes naysayers who claim (as a recent Adbusters cover story did) that hipstercult has no capacity for reflection, and protects this witty project from getting dismissed as an other-gendered send-up, a Weird Alice or Vaginal Tap. Indeed, hearing these gorgeous voices beg an abusive lover, like masochistic Oliver Twists, "Please sir, can I have some more," and plead to the economy, "Help me, I'm greedy!" ranks among the most intense and passionate moments in my listenership this year.
