Constant connectivity brings constant alienation, a paradox that's worried everyone from Parkay Quarts to Unknown Mortal Orchestra in the past year. Princess Chelsea, the songwriting project of Auckland-based singer Chelsea Nikkel, enters the fray with her second album, The Great Cybernetic Depression. Singing in a light deadpan against wild, bright production, Chelsea doesn't decry the Internet outright, nor does she revel in its potential utopianism. She skirts both easy roads to present an album whose lyrical content cuts hard lines against its pastel hues.
The Great Cybernetic Depression allegedly takes place 10 years in the future, when human relationships are even shallower and more atomized than they are now. The feeling of scrolling through a potential love interest's Instagram for half an hour hangs thick over the album's atmosphere; Chelsea packs anxiety flat and slick into her disaffected delivery. There is longing here, and it comes through in lyrics like "I will love you from far away/ Just not quite enough." But it never breaks her careful, polished facade.
Formerly Chelsea's partner on the runaway YouTube hit "The Cigarette Duet", Jonathan Bree returns for a few more numbers, but instead of lending depth to the album's world, he simply emphasizes its flatness. Bree and Chelsea both sing in easy, back-and-forth melodies, like they're performing a lullaby or the jingle to an instructional video. Even the lyrics tend to stick to monosyllables. The duet "Is It All OK?" indulges in some degree of world-building, hinting at an apocalyptic event that decimated the whole planet a decade ago. Crystalline arpeggios roll in waves behind both singers, and the beats branch out, but Chelsea and Bree's voices march on, affectless.
Instead of retreating to guitar and piano as emblems of a pre-computerized past, Chelsea melts both instruments into a synth-heavy mix. She even pushes them to their most comical extremes; "When the World Turns Grey" and "We Were Meant 2 B" both ripple with hot, sweet guitar solos like something yanked from the Guns N' Roses songbook and performed by a Guitar Center hopeful. They come out of nowhere, erupting from sugarplum synth decor just in time for you to realize that the songs have been power ballads all along. The space between accelerationist pop music and '80s hair metal has never looked so small.
The album's lead single and clear standout, "Too Many People" teeters on the fine edge that the rest of The Great Cybernetic Depression slips around. Chelsea sings of a city packed to the brim with miserable souls as keyboard lines sparkle beneath her, like "Eleanor Rigby" recast in Swarovski. Her lyrics are simple and her melodies even simpler, but the song hits like a fable marking an essential truth of her isolated post-urban condition. The Beatles' lonely Liverpool became our own lonely laptop screens: a million windows glowing, and none of them unlocked. Princess Chelsea presses something deep and sad between two narrow panes of glass: Everyone is closer to everyone else, but everyone is more scattered by the glut.
