Internet Arms is Shaun Fleming’s third release as the genre-bending alter ego Diane Coffee. The former Foxygen drummer is concerned with digital intimacy—the unbounded sharing that we do under social media’s watchful eye. That’s rich, raw material, and out of it, Fleming is sometimes able to spin a luminous and insightful song. On the title track, he paints the internet as a toxic lover blackmailing you into staying put—“I've got memory of all your history,” he taunts. It’s a far-flung idea—the internet as manipulative partner—made hauntingly realistic by Fleming's insightful characterization.
If only the album were made of more moments like these. But just as often, Fleming veers into pop sloganeering that has nothing to do with his theme. On the pulsing synth-rock opener “Not Ready to Go,” Fleming describes a situation worth walking away from —“Holding onto someone who’s giving you next to nothing”—his voice nearly breaking in the upper heights of his impressive range. It’s a sharp song, and on this and a few others (“Like a Child Does,” “Stuck in Your Saturday Night”), he successfully follows the map drawn by pop pioneer Robyn and used by other smart synth-pop acts like Christine and the Queens. These new inspirations guide Fleming into more promising territory than the glam-rock cos-play of Everybody’s a Good Dog. But they provide no real insight into intimacy, digital or otherwise.
Elsewhere, he falls back impressions of late ‘70s icons. On “Work It” Fleming borrows the *Stop Making Sense-*era yelps of David Byrne to bark commands at the listener: “You better take it, get it while the getting good,” followed by a triplet of phoned-in encouragement, “It’s worth it, you’ve earned it, just work it.” On the next song, “Good Luck,” Fleming cuts into his own encouraging words with “You won't get far if you're only working hard, here in America.” The vaudevillian instrumentation adds a cheery dash of nihilism, as do the flourishes that unexpectedly push the song into rock opera land (Fleming recently played King Herod in the Signature Theater’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar).
Fleming’s flair for the dramatic sometimes pushes into overdrive, replacing incisive writing with tricks. “Simulation,” “Lights Off,” and “Internet Arms” rely too heavily on digital manipulation to make their points, trying to coerce insight and meaning from Pro Tools plug-ins instead of incisive writing. Roboticizing his voice to intone “Ain't no problems in my simulation/A state of vegetation/In my personal isolation/Ain't no worries in my simulation” is affect overkill and doesn’t help answer the question he lays out later on in the lyrics — “Who am I without my simulation?”
Ultimately, Fleming doesn’t venture far enough into what disturbs him about our hyper-connected lives to come out of the other side of it with something interesting to say. Ignoring the wisdom in the old expression “The only way out is through,” a distracted Fleming instead attempts to circumnavigate his anxiety about the internet and observe it from the sidelines. He raises questions he doesn’t bother trying to answer and fails to address the many ways we empower online inauthenticity simply by being online and maintaining social media accounts. Addressing those hypocrisies would’ve made for a richer album. As it is, Fleming substitutes theatrics for insight.
