Written by: Matt Kosinski
I won’t lie to you folks: Boy With Robot are becoming a permanent fixture of my musical collection. See, the problem with loving music so much is that, when you acquire massive volumes of it every week, a lot of good bands get buried under the constant influx of new songs, bands, and albums. Conversely, the great bands, the bands that really know what they’re doing, the bands that write catchy, beautiful, and poignant tunes, they last much longer than a week on your playlist. Boy With Robot is exactly that kind of band, and This Past November sealed that deal.
The three songs on this E.P. are tender, poppy, brooding, sunny, and melancholic all at once. Yes, those are pretty disparate adjectives, but Boy With Robot yoke those seemingly opposing forces together with skill and finesse akin to Johnn Donne comparing love to a flea, and they do it just as successfully.
Okay, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here. You’re probably rolling your eyes right now, thinking, “I can’t believe this guy is so pretentious that he just compared an electro-pop duo from New Jersey to the world-renowned king of metaphysical poetry.” I don’t blame you, really I don’t. But trust me when I say this: after a couple of listens to This Past November, you’ll be just as ebullient as I am right now.
This Past November kicks off with the title track, which rides a bouncy, sparkling piano line and faint pulses of bass-y synth. The lyrics find Matthew Schmid taking some heavy trips down memory lane, as he describes making what sounds like an abstract-expressionist version of a scrapbook (“I’m cutting colors out of paper/to make a mosaic of this past November/And I cut and paste/no particular shape/it’s just what I remember”). Throughout it all, he manages to weave interlocking strains of both sorrow and joy into it all, and, for that, it feels so real. Schmid could have easily only paid attention to either the happiness or the sadness of the past, but, rather than produce something so two-dimensional, he includes it all. During the chorus, Schmid and Kelly Millen Harmonize, and it adds a twinge of hope to the song, even though they spend their time comparing themselves to leaves falling from trees and trees that scream for spring. At the end of the song, Schmid and Millen’s vocals are echoed by some group shouts played through what sounds like a megaphone. It gives the song a sense of urgency that it’s buoyant meandering lacks up until then, but without overdoing it, and it works.
“Tuesday’s Blues” is a bit more grandiose, although still as minimalist as we’ve come to expect from the duo. The here piano is a little stately, as opposed to the levity of “This Past November,” but still friendly and warm, creating a nice contrast with the basement electronic drumming that runs along in the background. Schmid and Millen deliver some pretty gorgeous musings on apathy, singing “I was stoned/I was trying not to care./I lit a cigarette/ just to throw it out somewhere.” Schmid and Millen deliver the lines in calm, almost unattached voices. Hovering just behind them, however, is another dub of Schmid’s voice, using his trademark, ragged howl. This contrast pretty much embodies what I love about Boy With Robot: for all of their minimalism, their laid-back approach, there’s real passion in what they’re doing. By melding that very real passion with their disaffected deliveries and song structures, they’re able to convincingly express emotion without getting sappy or sentimental.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: at the end of the song, the synths start soaring higher, the drums start getting distorted, and Schmid delivers a pseudo-hip-hop verse as Millen adds ghostly, drawn-out moaning in the background. It’s every bit as quirky as it sounds, and, well, you guessed it: it works.
The E.P. ends with “You Can’t Blame Me,” which is just as bouncy as the title track. It follows the same formula as the two songs before it: piano line, faint synthesizer flourishes, and programmed drumming. Boy With Robot know better than to fix what isn’t broken. The twist on the formula comes at the end (Boy With Robot are always good with endings): the instruments drop out as Millen and Schmid deliver a surprisingly strong a cappella verse, their fractured voices ,mirroring the strain, fear, and hope implicit in the lyrics they sing, “The only answer I find/is to hold your body close to mine/’cause we’ll both turn to dust in time/just resting in pieces.” It’s a fantastic close to a fantastic E.P.
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