Darla Records' James Agren had to put down his vegan tofu wrap just to make sure he'd read the email right. Barcelona were breaking up? What a bummer. Not only were they one of the main bands on the pulCec imprint, they'd basically written Darla's website. Nobody else had a sound quite like theirs-- some people had taken to calling it "programmer pop," what with the keyboard melodies and all the references to computers and software and stuff. Of course, they had taken to writing some stock songs like "Teenage Pop Star" lately. The keyboard intro soared like any classic new wave cut, and the boy-girl harmony was cute, but what was with the chorus? "Gonna be a teenage one-hit washed-up messed-up megalomaniac"-- yet the song sounded like it could be a Saturday morning cartoon intro! Anyway, they would be missed.
Jeff couldn't believe the news about Barcelona. He didn't like much synth-pop, but the jangling guitars gave these guys a rocking sound. They didn't use a drum machine, either-- it was all live. Who else was going to write songs like "I Have the Password to Your Shell Account"?! When he saw that song title on Napster back in the day, he thought it was a joke. And Jennifer Carr, whoa-- brains, beauty and a good voice. She could take his server down any day. It didn't make any sense, the new album was just as good as all the others. "West Coast Radio" was like a Beach Boys song for the digital age, with Jason Korzen singing about some intimidating California girl and Carr cooing backing vocals. The album art was cool, too-- images of robots with serving trays Photoshopped into pictures of African natives. It was something conceptual about primitives and futurists. But he had to get back to work; the figures for the next round of missile tests needed to be in by five.
Trevor Kampmann had seen it coming. All his engineering work couldn't do much for a song like "The Power of Jen." The surf riff wasn't much different than the Cult's "She Sells Sanctuary," and Jen Carr insisted on singing something twee about boys who kept calling her. The chorus was total fluff: "J-E-N-N-I-F-E-R." Ugh. They'd written some really great songs for the album, though. "Human Simulation" bleeped along with its buzzy Casio keyboards, and Carr's soaring "I'd give you anything that you want" was irresistible. They really should have put her in front of the mic more often. Most of the songs featured Korzen on main vocals, and his delivery was just too forced. Cameron Crowe was a fan, and he'd helped them to decide the final sequencing, but they couldn't seem to put together enough songs to last half an hour. They may have perfected their style, but all the mid-tempo rhythms didn't make for much excitement, and the guitar tone tended to slip into monotony.
Sarah sat back from her iMac. She'd just imagined a two-song suite. It began with a minute-and-a-half-long instrumental, "April 1978," which featured a gently rolling beat and a guitar pinging at the high registers sentimentally. That would serve as an introduction to "I Get the Message," another slow ballad that didn't descend into cliché. Some lyrics even popped up in her head: "Radio waves reflect across the screen/ Terminal haze, your transmission's beamed/ I feel the impact from the satellite that's calling me." Later on, maybe she'd have somebody going "bah-dah, dah-dah" over and over again, like a verbal expression of those lonely radio waves. But then it occurred to her that maybe she was spending way too much time at rockstargame.com. It was fun to watch her little automatons write the same songs over and over, and "Everything Makes Me Think About Sex" almost made it to hit single. But it was clear that a indie rock band inspired by silly 80s groups like Sparks probably didn't have a chance to climb to the top, and it wasn't going to get her an 'A' in Logic. Time to get back to work.
