Shoegaze has often struck me as a particularly “warm” sounding genre. You know the sounds: huge instrumental washes smudging out the presence of vocals, leaving behind gestural traces of mood and feeling; a general sense not unlike blurred-out smears of color (e.g., the gauzy red of Loveless, the blue tides of Nowhere, the sickly yellow of Ferment). Instead of the concrete or plainly stated, much shoegaze washes over the listener, smothering the ears with a big fuzzy blanket of texture — but suppose one were to apply the shoegaze aesthetic to the absence of color, or feeling? What happens when such an enveloping sound loses its warmth, or trades in the ethereal wash for crushing weight?
In 1993, Bailter Space answered this question with the release of Robot World, their debut LP for Matador Records. It was the first album from the originally Christchurch, NZ-based trio to see wide release stateside, roughly coinciding with their relocation to New York. True to its title, Robot World takes the shoegaze sound and renders it cold and mechanical: human feeling replaced by the factory line, and personal alienation wrought by a pervasively unrelenting world of technology.
Frontman Alister Parker’s vocals may occasionally be washed-out, but the music on Robot World belies any sort of ethereal pondering: instead of enveloping warmth, thick swathes of guitars form an austere latticework of mechanical grit, like rusted powerlines fizzling before a meltdown. On “EIP,” for example, the band’s guitars aren’t “played” so much as “bludgeoned.” The video for “EIP,” featuring Bailter Space performing in an abandoned concrete junkyard (which, I agree, is a pretty clichéd idea for a video by this point, but the brutality of empty concrete juxtaposed with distorted video footage really does suit the song’s detached emotional squalor) even shows as much, framing John Halvorsen’s bass playing as, well, a fist against the strings.
This isn’t all to suggest that Robot World is overwhelmingly cold or detached, however. The gliding verse melodies of “Make,” for example, hit wistful dream-pop territory, albeit only to be crushed shortly thereafter by a few extra layers of guitar distortion (it was 1993 — that’s to be expected, no?). Elsewhere, “Morning” pits a longingly strained vocal melody amidst energetic drive; “Ore” progresses with the closest thing to rhythmic swagger Robot World has and “Get Lost,” the lone track recorded in New York, is flat-out visceral. When played at the proper volume (i.e., loud), Robot World is staggeringly immense: headphones or loudspeakers are a necessity.
