A Trillion Barnacle Lapse - The Elemental Gearbot
(Level Plane)
A Trillion Barnacle Lapse's album The Elemental Gearbot is a moderately confusing albeit interesting affair, and I am not sure what to think about it. My ambivalence towards the album stems from the odd juxtaposition of Six Finger Satellite-ish discordant lurch-rock with 80s synth sounds along with some awfully typical chord-structures. At some points the album pushes to do something novel with rock, at others, it seems to wallow in its name-checked predecessors. My ambivalence though is mostly defined by the idea that this could merely be part of a trend that Xiu Xiu either started, or made more apparent.
Re-reading Tom Eigen's review of Knife Play, I cannot help but feel that the same elements that elicited his praise and remonstration of that album are working here for The Elemental Gearbot. At times the combination of the aforementioned precursors works in its favor creating a novel sound, however, at other times, the band comes off in the same overly-theatrical way Xiu Xiu does, leaving them sounding, simply, derivative.
The lyrics also suffer from a mild form of schizophrenia, vacillating between melodramatic over-emotional sensibilities and Devo-like unfeeling robotics, even referencing Feynman and Von Neumann at one point. The placement of such opposing ideas is interesting, even if the affected delivery negates both real emotion and the cold, unfeeling of machinery.
Overall though, the album leaves me feeling somewhat empty. While it is certainly worth looking into, mostly due to its recontextualizing of some of Knife Play's ideas in another arena, I cannot help but feel that, as an emotive work, it never gets close to really evoking any feelings and as an intellectual work, its ideas are only a slight variation on others' pieces. Regardless, it is of interest simply by dint of it being different.
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