Album Review

Pulsars geek rock digitally perfected

By Todd Martens
Staff Writer

Pulsars
Pulsars
(Almo Sounds)

Two brothers and one robot. Dave on vocals, guitar and keyboards; Harry on drums and T-9000; or Theodore if you prefer, in charge of synthesized giggles, squeaks, beeps, squirts and flourishing melodies. Theadore is a computer that's like a friend who's always so annoyingly happy. However, coupled with Dave's sweet, nerdy and melancholy lyrics, never once does T-9000 get annoying; he only shows you that in a world often filled with heartache, there's still plenty of reason to smile.
Seldom does synthesized music take on such a charming and lovable personality. Chicago's Dave and Harry have so carefully orchestrated every millisecond of this album--it took six months to record--to plead and beg and complain, all with a clever, whimsical, no-nonsense attitude.
Dave owes so much to T-9000 that he even dedicated a song to him. Talks with paper tongues / he laughs at funny sounds / T-9000, I adore you, sings Dave, but he soon wants to know if his friend will always be ready to perform every time he's plugged in.
Later, he's the kid who was picked on in school and runs home to find solace in his computer. With a ping-pong bass line, Dave looks down on his obsolete computers before building up to a powerful chorus in which he dreams of these computers taking over. The guitars give way to the computers, and if IBMs could throw a party, this is what it would sound like.
Maybe if Bill Gates started a rock band with R2-D2 playing bass, it would sound somewhat like the Pulsars.
References to the Cars, Cure and New Order abound--Dave even sings like a Ric Ocasek eternally stuck at 16--and it could easily be an alternate soundtrack to an early John Hughes film. But it somehow sounds totally today, which probably has something to do with all this talk of electronic music taking over.
Dave also takes pride in being geeky. At times he makes Weezer seem like the cool kids, and he has more of heart than the other geek rockers could hope for. He's not rejecting anything; he's loving it. This is music that screams, "Hey, look at me! I'm a dork and I couldn't be happier!" And it couldn't have been done any better.
Computers and robots make him happy, and when it comes to relationships, he's the kid who walked with the girl after school and carried her books for her--all the way to her boyfriend's house.
On "Suffocation," he opens with the chorus backed by what sound like an out-of-control kazoo, foot stomps and hand-claps before stripping all to a mid-tempo guitar riff where he concedes that he's a "first-rate flake." The song sounds harmless enough, but the warning at the end about the tendency of relationships to blind is anything but.
On "Submission Song," he's given up and just wants to know what it feels like to be kissed... and, well, a few other things.
"Save You" features a multitude of "bah, bahs" mimicking a trumpet, but they become so fast and overlapping that it's like an old Terry Gilliam animated short with faces uncontrollably popping up all over the place. But once again, the message about a friend who needs help is far from a cartoon, and Dave is much more than some kid who likes computers.
Even when he gets serious, Dave can still be a kid at heart. If the Replacements' "Bastards of the Young" were run through a gum-ball machine, you would have the opening to "Runway." We no longer want your tiny brains / And we've said it all before / That this planet is such a bore, sings Dave as aliens realize Earth doesn't have much to offer.
Then there's "Tunnel Song," which at first appears simply to be a song about various tunnels across America, recalling the Cars' "Shake It Up," but maybe it's a metaphor for life's tendency to hit tunnels, where everything gets dare and, like AM radio, communication seems forced and hard to understand. Or maybe that's over-analyzing. A+