The art of creating a new sound isn’t necessarily to go beyond the concept of established genres altogether but rather to break the dams of musical demarcation that separate them so that their musical contents all start to spill and flow together into one strange sonic mess. Or, at least, that is how Replaced By Robots approaches things. And the latest result of such a creative deluge is The Experiment, a five-track attack of the most marvelous and mercurial music you have ever heard.
Kicking off with “The Laboratory,” an apt title for the sonic experiments that they seem to conduct within its less than two-minute sojourn, we are greeted with a psycho-billy groove and shards and squalls of sonics, vocals are reduced to voice-as-instruments, and you come out the other side making a mental note to play those old Cramps and B-52’s albums.
By contrast, “All The Lonely Nights” is a strange blend of do-woop vocals and gnarly indie-pop guitars, but indie-pop that seems to come from the future rather than a recognizable past. “Are We In Love or Am I Just Losing My Mind” takes us down an alternative path of glam rock, one that, had it been an option back in the day, would have ensured the genre’s longevity, and “Air of Uncertainty” is a short, beguiling cinematic soundbite.
Things round off with “Since You Broke My Ouija Board” – you can’t say that Replaced by Robots Don’t have some great titles – again, a song that seems to reference some great 50’s sounds whilst running it through spiky, industrial-pop landscapes.
Writing about music this unique, this genre-free, this brilliantly strange, is hard, or at least trying to describe it to the potential listener is. Imagine if you were those Aztecs on the Mexican shoreline watching those Spanish galleons drop anchor and strangely dressed men in armor with guns and horses debark for the first time. This is the sonic equivalent of that.
