The Singles Jukebox

Remember how we managed to score “Love etc.” over a 7 without anyone really expressing any enthusiasm for it? Well, this is sort of the reverse…

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[6.00]

Alex Macpherson: For fuck’s sake, people, get over the robot thing. You are not cute.
[2]

Jonathan Bradley: Expressing emotional emptiness via automaton metaphors is now as hackneyed as rhyming “honey” and “money,” or “city” and “lights are pretty,” but this little Beautiful Small Machines number is so disarmingly left-field that I’ll give them a pass for this one. The most bizarre — and prospectively grating — aspect of the song is its odd collision of twee pop and chirpy Venga Boys-derived Eurodance; as tinny as it is, that four-to-the-floor thump sounds like its fresh out of late ’90s Ibiza. Seems lobotomized pop-ravers are an excellent match for arrested-development indie kids, though, because “Robots in Love” aches deliciously. The android conceit is simply unnecessary while Bree Sharp can name drop “QotSA” and Aqua Teen, or sketch sweet scenes like, “When he said, ‘I love you girl’/It was four in the morning… It should have come with a warning.” Utterly charming. (Also, Sharp rhymes “started to malfunction” with “hit me like a punch in.” No reason to mention that, but: credit where credit is due.)
[7]

Anthony Miccio: The chorus metaphor doesn’t cohere nearly enough to forgive including a cliche as moldy as “push comes to shove,” but the song stands out from the tweelectronica pack all the same, with Bree Sharp’s country-pop vocals and a Franz Ferdinand break after the first chorus that’s oddly never revisited. Sadly, these are just the kind of quirks that would get smoothed out if they brought in pros to fix the lyrics.
[7]

Rodney J. Greene: The singer’s unappealing yet characterless voice is mixed front and center, but I’m not sure subsuming it into the tinny production would help other than to obscure some of the worst lyrics I’ve ever heard. Not only does this contain the most hackneyed expression of the digital love cliche yet, but it is littered with insultingly obvious rhymes and dealbreaker pop-cult references. The opening lines are “QotSA on the hi-fi/ We were talking via wi-fi/ So much Aqua Teen and sci-fi,” and it only gets worse from there. I pressed stop in disbelief after “In the afternoons/ When we lay like spoons,” and left myself to wonder if this took place in June.
[1]

Michaelangelo Matos: Very catchy mid-’90s alt, but when I honed in on the words — “Then we started to malfunction/Then it hit me like a punch in all our hours of connection and affection/When he said ‘I love you, girl’/It was only science fiction” (yep, she hollers it triumphantly, as if she’d punched the air so hard when she wrote the lines that she’d share that euphoria with the rest of us) — the whole thing went clunk.
[5]

Anthony Easton: If love is like Arithmetic, and Sex is Calculus, then romance has nothing to do with biology. For some reason, this song talks to me as both a man and as an aspie, who has spent the last year on one set of romantic disasters after another. We should take the chorus as an ironic attachment to some kind of refusal.
[8]

Martin Kavka: A genrefuck elegy for the decade coming to an end. The first verse sounds like I Am The World Trade Center remixing Usher (while namechecking Queens of the Stone Age!). The song then drives through Kelly Clarkson Done Wrong subdivision before making a right turn at Disco Strings Boulevard, a left at Throbbing Indie Bass Lane, and finally parking at The House Of Pure Pop.
[9]

Ian Mathers: Well, the first seventy-five seconds here proves to me that someone can adapt Owl City’s sonic and lyrical approach enough to make me not completely hate it, but once the guitars come in I suddenly notice how much that (pretty good) chorus sort of reminds me of modern pop country. And then there’s strings for a second. And the middle eight is kind of a mess. In fact the whole thing is kind of a mess in that everything-but-the-kitchen sink way, but the chorus does manage to tie it all together, and “Robots in Love” sprawls in a way that’s lovable, not annoying.
[7]

Iain Mew: Bubbly, instant electronic pop meets pure-voiced country inflected heartbreak. Sounds like a combination of the best of Taylor Swift and The Postal Service, though neither would pull off ‘wi-fi/hi-fi’ or the ‘erotic exploration’ line with such a light touch. Heads straight to the top of the 2009 robot love pile ahead of “The Girl and the Robot”, “I Am Not a Robot” et al.
[9]

Matt Cibula: Got some love for Bree, and very much like the direction she’s headed here, especially with the disco strings undercutting the song’s basic wispiness.
[7]

Chuck Eddy: Her singing is hardly devoid of blood running through it, but she still manages to seem way more like an automaton than the synths (which start out really catchy). Pretty sure that’s not what she means when she calls herself a robot.
[4]