Jake Mandell - Love Songs for Machines
(Carpark)
Jake Mandell has proven that he can pull off complexity (Parallel Processes)
and deceptive simplicity (Quondam Current) with equal production aplomb.
Love Songs for Machines, a suite of sweet sonic somethings dedicated to his
desktop's electronic array, aims for emotion--electronic music's most
elusive character. Emotion, whose base metal is humanity, calls for caprice
distinctly at odds with the robotic precision of techno's timekeeping. It
can be achieved--see Mark Van Hoen's brilliant Playing with Time--but it
requires a good measure of cleverness to do it well. Kid606, taking on the
same challenge with PS I Love You, opted for an amorphous, open-ended matrix
of DSP soundhacking sprawl. While Mandell and Kid606 correspond in their
taste for wordy, charmingly childish track titles, the former finds a more
concrete compromise than the Kid's in the plastic elasticity of pop.
Creatively complicated beats tick off the requisite 4/4 floor count with a
touch of speaker-hopping edginess. '80s-vintage synths serve up toothsome,
sometimes over-sweetened sounds. Like emotions, Mandell's melodies are a
messy lot. They often gush in smitten gasps, moseying around a track's
litter of sampled shrapnel and tautly strung basslines. Each cut is kept
within the pop form's four-minute constraints. "The Surf and the Circus" and
"Two Doses of Diometic Hexameter" borrow as freely from the hook-happy likes
of Depeche Mode and OMD as they do from the sensual pulse of Detroit purism.
"The Prince and the Palm," with its lurching rhythms and meandering refrain
of pillowy synth, comes across like a rubato remix of "Mr. Roboto." Deeper
cuts such as "Divinity Takes a Dive" and the dub-wracked "The Princess
Speaks of Love" incorporate shards of vocal samples and ever-trickier skeins
of digital FX, climaxing in the expert techno craft of "The Fragmented
Icon." Love Songs winds down with an inscrutably titled pair of "Epilogue"
tracks, neither of which adds much to the experience beyond pleasant
atmospheric afterthoughts, but the bulk of the album is impressive in its
careful balance of sentiment and economy.
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