Hoo boy, I can think of at least a thousand ways I can get into trouble with this review. I Am the World Trade Center know my pain; thanks to a certain day last fall, the thought-associations their name evoked changed from kitschy capitalistic monolith to slow-motion catastrophe replay. Sensitive to the country's general freaked-outedness but still needing to pay their bills, Dan Geller and Amy Dykes continued touring under the slightly censored moniker I Am The... for a while. But with the release of The Tight Connection, the duo have resumed using their original name, boldly leading the way back to normalcy for similar hard-luck acts like Burning Airlines, Anthrax, and little-known Albuquerque high-school group O-Ska-ma Bin Laden.
Now, after reading album reviews assessing the role of everyone from Andrew WK to Nelly in our new hyper-paranoid age, I made a personal vow never to wrassle with Spooky Tuesday-related themes in my own work, and I won't bite on the alluring bait this album offers. I will observe, however, that the band's quick and fairly non-controversial resumption of the World Trade Center title (cynical publicity reasons aside) closely parallels our country's own short-term memory with disaster. Just as they're already slinging around plans to rebuild the WTC to reclaim precious lost office space, and the country has returned to losing sleep over the Dow rather than Middle-Eastern insurgents, the band sees no reason to lose brand loyalty with a pesky, confusing name change.
Makes sense, though, since musically, that same collective short-term memory is exactly what I Am the World Trade Center banks on. Coloring carefully between the lines laid out by their eighties synth-pop ancestors, Geller and Dykes do little with their updated technology that would sound unfamiliar to the asymmetrically coifed hordes should The Tight Connection be shot back to 1986 in a time machine. It's laptops instead of octagonal drum pads, but can you tell the difference?
Owners of I Am the World Trade Center's previous album, Out of the Loop, already know this, but repeat visitors might be surprised by the greater emphasis upon the synth part of the band's musical equation. I Am the WTC's songs go down easier when samples provide at least a tenuous link back to the world of actual instruments, as on Loop's flute-y "Me to Be" or the theme-show-brass of The Tight Connection's "Dancing Alone." By comparison, the machine-bought drum breaks and parade of synthesizers found on tracks like "Believe in Me" and "California Dreaming Again" are a little too cold and rigid like for the oh-happy-day vibe they attempt to create, like a keyboard demo preset.
Of course, even the iciest Powerbook arrangement can be warmed up with a charismatic vocal, but Dykes' cords hardly move the mercury. Preferring a low-range, low-variability style, Dykes' singing bears an unfortunate resemblance to the squirmingly awkward Joey Lauren Adams musical number in Chasing Amy-- look no further than the rather flat take on Blondie's "Call Me." The detached, semi-ironic delivery doesn't play well with the perky club beats, making even the slam-dunk seductive questions of "Big Star" ("do you want to drive around in a big car?") sound less than alluring.
This could-be-irony is ultimately what brings down The Tight Connection, plopping I Am the World Trade Center down in an uncomfortable middle region between your deadly serious synth acts (i.e. The Faint) and your bubblegum brand (i.e. any synth-laden radio single from 1981-1988). Without any significant additions to the field, it's hard to imagine what niche the album fills that couldn't be filled by, say, a highlights mix-tape of that seven-disc 1980s collection Rhino recently released. If your record collection sorely lacks a boy/girl duo with a Reagan-era fixation, going with Adult is probably the better bet. At the very least, their bandname will release far fewer repressed memories.
