A common lament amongst music fans is that certain albums would be greatly improved if only the artist had cut certain songs from the tracklist. But On Vacation, the sophomore full-length from San Diego-based lo-fi pop group The Robot Ate Me, marks the first occurrence I know of for which the band has made the distinction between their worthwhile and subpar tracks so staggeringly clear. To this curious end, On Vacation is spread over two discs: The first indulges all the pretenses for which many people dismiss lo-fi indie rock completely: half-baked noodling in the name of experimentation; painfully ironic lyrics for songs with titles like "The Genocide Ball" and "I Slept Through the Holocaust", and loads of novelty instrumentation. In marked contrast, The Robot Ate Me cut the shit on the second disc to offer their best songs yet.
The band's 2002 debut, They Ate Themselves, was nothing if not promising: The Robot Ate Me consists of three clearly intelligent musicians, and as that disc showed, when they take the extra time to structure their good ideas and censor their bad ones, their music comes out creative, compelling and often stunningly catchy. With On Vacation's second disc, they seem to have realized this themselves, crafting songs rewarding enough to forgive the first disc's utter tripe entirely.
Compare disc one's hissy emo closer, "On Vacation", with the second disc's upbeat and clever opener of the same name: Drummer Dave Greenberg's jumpy hi-hat swish is pushed way back in the mix, making room for Ryland Bouchard's perfectly shaky, bittersweet delivery. Deadpan lines like, "Let's go back home to where it's familiar/ I can't take this bright burning sun," work brilliantly here, stringing out fantastic lyrical/musical tension that felt so clumsily and obviously executed on the first disc.
"Apricot Tea" is the lush sibling track to disc two's "On Vacation". Bouchard is still dead-on here, but with an even more curious rubato for his introductory remarks: "If you want to lie at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, I'll/ Be the one that comes with my ship and be the one that drops the anchor down." What follows is a thick but wispy vocal chorus of disembodied, wordless harmonizing that forms the waterfall backdrop for the song's anthemic line, "Oh, will you be the one that smiles for me?", which provides the record's biggest and best hook.
The album closer, "I'm Ok", employs Chris Meng's tasteful banjo accompaniment as the glue for the song's many moods, and jumps back and forth through various crosshatchings of Bouchard's simultaneous joy and despair in the song's chorus line, "Hey, I'm all right down here.../ And really, it's ok." This is The Robot Ate Me's most robust song, and a promising end to an album that so unnecessarily wades through its own detritus on disc one to fully showcase itself on disc two. Maybe there's a point to On Vacation's disparity, or some subtle concept behind it that has to this very sentence remained elusive. But if there isn't one, The Robot Ate Me should feel free to skip the noise and cut straight to their songs next time-- when they want to be, they're actually quite good.
