From the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ anti-cellphone signage to Savages’ humanist manifestos, the 2013 musical landscape is starting to resemble a Terminator-style revolt against our machine masters. Even the robot rockers in Daft Punk are using their rare press appearances to extol the virtues of using real, live sentient beings to perform on their new record. But don’t expect When Saints Go Machine to join the uprising; the Danish quartet don’t just embrace electronics, they surrender to them. The band’s previous two releases inspired no lack of synth-pop descriptors, but for them, the synthesizer is a literal concept-- an interface that allows them to truly fuse the human and the artificial, and translate emotions into digital frequencies and vice versa. Their band name may have started out as an awkward pun, but at its core lies a certain modernness-is-next-to-godliness ideology.
On Infinity Pool, When Saints Go Machine treat their songs very much as machines-- i.e., mechanical objects that are constantly rewired and reassembled into new forms and functions. But as with any science-lab experiment, the process is as arduous as it is illuminating. Both in terms of the internal song components and the tracklist as a whole, Infinity Pool comes off as disjointed, as if we’re hearing the band piece the tracks together in real time without a manual and hope the final product holds together. In Nikolaj Vonsild’s processed voice, there's a palpable sense of wonder at his ability to transform his new-romantic croon into a sad-robot warble. But that curious quality ultimately proves to be the album’s undoing-- in that the band seem so enamored with the sounds they’re emitting, they often lose sight of the songs.
Ironically, the odd-couple pairing with Killer Mike on lead single “Love & Respect” results in Infinity Pool’s most fully realized moment, its gothic strings and gritty boom-bap beat effectively bridging the gap between the Atlanta rapper’s streetwise swagger and Vonsild’s trembling murmur. (Plus, it’s a lot more fun and catchy than 2013’s other fey/gangsta hybrid.) However, the fact it’s featured here as the opener only magnifies its complete disconnect from the rest of the album, which deemphasizes rhythm and concision in favor of ominous bass drones, doodling synths, and perpetually rearranging melodies that often feel at odds with the music trying to support them.
Compared to the relatively streamlined electro-pop of 2011’s Konkylie, Infinity Pool is decidedly darker and a more demanding a listen. When their vision comes into focus, When Saints Go Machine are capable of some arresting moments-- the beaming chorus of “System of Unlimited Love” and the clattering climax of “Slave to Your Take in Heaven,” in particular-- but they take a fair amount of trudging through moody, meandering passages to get there. And the album’s sense of gravitas is continually undermined by the undue emphasis on Vonsild’s fragile voice, which is over-modulated to the point of sounding cartoonish, like Antony Hegarty karate-chopping his own throat to produce a faux underwater effect. There’s much to admire about When Saints Go Machine’s effort to move their synth-powered pop music away from the dancefloor into more cerebral realms. But like the band name itself, their attempts at cleverness can come off sounding clunky.
