Lucky Cloud, Your Sky

“Yes, we live in a world where the popularity of Wolf Parade is enough to sustain not one, but three yelpy moustache bands, yet the Horseshoe doesn’t even fill for HILOTRONS’ CD release. There is no God.”

-From Cokemachineglow

Yesterday at Darwin’s, slinging sandwiches and non-fat lattes at entitled Cambridge housewives, grumpy elderly people, and kids who look like they just finished their A&F photoshoot, I played the latest HILOTRONS record. This elicited two different responses from customers.

1) A man asked me if they were Native American. This, in itself, is incomprehensible — a band that so easily evokes lasers, space shuttles and flashing lights does not strike me as remotely Native American. Then again, in this particular sandwich shop someone once came in and asked if we sold “meat sandwiches” and we are regularly asked if we are “out of sandwiches”. Furthermore, I have not heard of any Native American tribes developing synthesizer technology or writing songs about samurai robots.

2) When I described them to a coworker as “a new wave disco Talking Heads” (which is an overly-reductive statement I only half believe), a woman gave me a very shocked and dismayed look. Prompting me to tell her, “trust me, you know its true. Just go with it.”

Perhaps this doesn’t best describe what makes this album so fantastic. Maybe I just wanted to take this opportunity to harp a bit on my customers (true). Or maybe it gets to the center of something crucial to the album’s successes. This album, for all of its pop hooks and its thousands of clever little riffs, for all of its superb songwriting, confuses people a bit and occupies an unfair underdog slot. It’s different, it’s idiosyncratic, it’ll toss you around a little bit, but it more than pays back whatever little bits of time you are willing to put into listening. Then again, they aren’t a yelpy mustache band, so most people won’t put in the effort.

But I’ll be screwed if it’s not a taut little album, stretched tight in a modest show of musical mastery. The HILOTRONS are a band that inspire the sort of strange reductive statements that I made, because we can’t quite get a handle on them any other way. Another coworker described their music as sounding “like it was made by robits”. Though, for all their perfection — and these guys play in the pocket — they don’t sound like Steely Dan. As opposed to that dad-rock group’s music, these songs are not asceptic. They were not assembled in a laboratory with white machinery.

A great deal of this human warmth seems to come from the creativity these guys exude. This is evident in not only the takes-some-getting-used-to vocals, but also and the way that the band keeps reconfiguring your point of view within the song. Sometimes the vocal melody scoops when you expect it to jump, sometimes it jumps when you expect it to dive. Sometimes the musical style changes with such sliding ease that you wonder if you are still listening to the same song, and often you are though sometimes you are not. This band is abrupt but comfortable with it. Disco? Sure. Mariachi horns? Whatever. New wave? Great. I honestly can’t wrap my mind around how a band is so comfortable with this many styles at the same time without looking disingenuous in the least. Furthermore, the impressive contrast of styles and timbres shows a wonderful understanding of both songwriting and production. The last time I felt this smitten with something the first time I heard it was the first time I listened to Enon’s High Society. A band could hardly have a more complimentary point of reference.

I have listened to nothing but this album for days.

Shockingly solid and never showy, this is an album from a band that keeps as a riff what most would beat to death for a whole song, Happymatic is a slamdunk effort by a band that seems like they are so comfortable doing it that they don’t even care if you notice or not. We need more bands this comfortable with themselves writing pop music.

Get it!

Myspace