Shit Robot Best Heard Drunk and in the Dark

Shit Robot is dance music, and as such, hearing it for the first time at a discothèque—where the ceaseless electronic pulse would (presumably) sync with the flashing lights, and the (almost disjoint) vocals would add a sort of metacognition to the scene—is very different from listening to it on a pair of earbuds. The man behind the music, Michael Lambkin, is an Irish DJ who got started mixing beats in Dublin before bringing European electronic music to New York. He’s played in clubs for most of his career, and it’s clear from the variety in his bass lines that he has a good understanding of the dynamics of a dance floor. However, processing music when gyrating to it in a dark room is incomparable to simply listening, and Shit Robot’s new album, “From the Cradle to the Rave,” just doesn’t hold up quite as well to close attention and a well-lit room.

The aesthetic of Shit Robot, like that of much from its genre, is mostly one of combining beats—while it incorporates melodic elements, they’re often lost in the blips of the percussion. As such, much of its musical interest lies in the texture of its instrumentation. And while Shit Robot is adept at blending a beat, the scope of his sound isn’t quite broad enough to be consistently interesting. It’s a little too clean; there are a lot of silvery blips, some bouncing semi-musical percussion; but few elements of texture to add a grain to the medley. Exceptions are in the songs “I Found Love,” which incorporates a sort of electronic screech—like an engine accelerating or a record skipping and being swiveled back and forth on a turntable—and the less-melodic “Grim Receiver,” which opens with a percussive ricochet that lasts a good minute or so before fading to the bass line. “Triumph” even has the occasional ring of a guitar. Overall, the release has some interesting moments—the beat is usually varied, and though the music incorporates very few melodic elements, there’s some good bleedle-ing in “Triumph” and “Tuff Enuff”.

The voice clips added to the music may be the album’s most interesting element. While they often blend into the background, sometimes even acquiring the echoing thrum of the beat, their timbre adds a new dimension to the electronic grind. Lambkin used a variety of vocalists in the release—female and male, singing and speaking, often repeating the same lyrics over and over again—like some odd meditation on the synthesized tumult. Many of the vocalists are reminiscent of some older rock artists. The man singing in “Grim Receiver,” for instance, sounds not unlike the chorus of the Alan Parsons Project as he chants “Waiting for the grim placebo / Get yourself a new prevention;” the almost-psychedelic repetition in “Losing My Patience” is reminiscent of The Flaming Lips. All of the vocalists have a very distinct timbre, a sound that’s surprising, because it’s usually accompanied by drums and a guitar instead of the sound of synthesizers. The vocals are less melodic than one would expect from an electronic mix, but they add valuable texture to the rest of the sound, as well as some conceptual interest in their human counterpoint to a space-age jam.

Appropriately, most of the lyrics in the release are hazily centered on human life as it relates to machines. “Answering Machine” is particularly thoughtful; it’s an answering machine that talks back—“It’s not easy to play back, and listen again...”—with a sort of sultry plea, “I need more than your voice.” The song “Simple Things (Work It Out)” empahsizes the emotional subtext of the work: “Life’s so simple now / You’ve got computers to do everything / We don’t have to do anything! / Just open our eyes! / But man, even that’s hard sometimes!” Both concepts, as with much of the album, have a sense of vague foreboding about them—but, as with the other songs, they’re not well-articulated, and are more reflections than a cogent message.

Juxtaposed with the onslaught of the synthetics, the musing about machines is oddly self-conscious; perhaps the fingerprint of an artist who has spent more than twenty years playing this sort of music. Shit Robot is the sort of music that will either add an element of sophistication to the entire dance-floor setup, or make you eerily wonder what you’re doing there in the first place. Though I wouldn’t know, it’s probably a really great album for dancing. It’s probably an even better album to get drunk to beforehand. Don’t put it on iTunes.