As a descriptor, "electronic music" is pretty expansive; at a time when nearly all music is produced with the aid of computers, it’s also fairly meaningless. Still, if you attempted to take stock of everything that could be fairly placed under that tent, you might start with experimental music, move through dance music’s various permutations and end up at the sort of post-Postal Service pop you’d expect to hear in a car commercial. Trágame Tierra, the latest full-length from Mellowdrone frontman and touring M83 member Jonathan Bates, feels like just such a survey of all things "electronic." This is a record that pivots from industrial noise to radio-friendly pop on a dime, which counts Debbie Gibson among its guests yet closes with 10 minutes of synth drone. To call Trágame Tierra ambitious would be an understatement.
Admittedly, Bates’ adventurousness and disregard for genre lines results in some novel combinations. "Well My Heart" layers a folk-country vocal over racing synth arpeggios and an '80s pop rhythm. "Overlord" starts out as a pounding house number yet lands somewhere closer to the Knife’s deviant Scandinavian electro-pop. "Kid Icarus" is powered by an appropriately chiptune-like beat but counts a Brian Wilson falsetto among its vocal quirks. And the aforementioned Gibson feature carries "RCVR" to a place where The Cars, Daft Punk, and Vangelis meet.
For the most part, though, Bates’ stock in trade here is middle-of-the-road electronic-pop, the sort of music you might find yourself fidgeting to while standing in line at the pharmacy. There’s an arena-sized ambition in these songs—widescreen production, huge choruses, layer after layer of instrumentation and vocals—but Bates’ ability as a songwriter to deliver on that intent is limited. As eager to please as these songs are, none of them can really be called catchy or memorable; big hooks abound but none of them stick.
Lyrically too, Trágame Tierra offers far too little to hold on to. On nearly every song, it feels like Bates is aiming for maximum reliability but often ends up with phrasings that feel wholly generic: "Gonna grow old in California," "You can bring me up/Just to bring me down," "Well my heart, she is a-melting." One song finds Bates reassuring the listener by repeating the phrase, "It’s OK" ad nauseam. These sorts of lyrics only reinforce the feeling that many of these tracks are more jingle than song.
To be certain, Bates does have plenty of potential as a musician. For evidence of this, just look to some of the minor details tucked away in these songs: the wobbly, mournful synths that open up "I See Fit," the delicate, chiming melodies of "H.A." and "Strange Cakes," the joyously bent notes that scurry through "RCVR"’s coda. However, there are just too many ideas crammed into these songs and far too few that connect. On Trágame Tierra, Bates is both audacious and original, two qualities that are hard to fault. But in the absence of focus, listening to Trágame Tierra can feel like looking for dinner in a candy store: there's a lot of brightly-colored packaging to take in but not much you can really sink your teeth into.
