There is an unfortunate style of music that trades on nothing other than being life-affirming. But synthesized women singing about the night and your inherent self-worth do not make for a good time. Fortunately, there are many people who think so too, and some are making music.
Three artists form a concerted effort to reclaim the vocal sounds normally associated with good thoughts for the minutia and frenzied unkindness of daily life. The husband-and-wife duo Adult. (yes, with a period) sound like articulate robots that spent some downtime in nightclubs and came back to report their findings through music.
The song “Pressuresuit” is mostly comprised of “do you like my handbag? / it’s filled with lots of money/ I want to spend my money on entertainment” mixed over sparse glitches and distortions. “Glue Your Eyelids Together” proves that self-referential music about willful denial can be quite danceable, in the process assuring you that any criticism that can be made of Adult. will be made into a song by Adult.
Miss Kitten, a French ex-stripper, uses similarly blatant lyrics to convey the glamorous. In “Frank Sinatra,” the deadpan and accented Kitten wails lude club-themed lyrics, before intoning an extended cry of “V.I.P. areaaa.” Through Kitten, the sleaze of lounge music is brought to self-conscious heights-the floor still feels sticky and the beer watered down, but somehow, pretending it’s Pabst Blue Ribbon becomes perversely fun.
If any of this is going anywhere-and the dancing fashion imps in the back seat insist it’s so-PFFR is pointing the way. In “Open Letter,” a woman reads a letter to the Prime Minister of France, accompanied by a dance beat. The wordplay is distracted and endless: “enough of these pleasantries/enough of these pleasurable apple trees” follows “tell your associates, I said, to tell them, to mention.”
During an interview with a magazine, an old woman asked a member of PFFR where the bathroom is, to which he responded by pulling a dollar out of his wallet, folding it into a crane, and blowing it in the proper direction. It may not be music in the usual sense, but it’s certainly music for robots, with a twist.
