Part concept album, part extended metaphor, the debut EP from Beautiful Small Machines is a robot-themed mixture of spiff electro-pop with a splash of acoustic ballad. Dancing down a fine line just this side of geek-rock, sweet and sassy vocals from Bree Sharp mingle with 80s-flashback synth productions from music man Don DiLego to create the perfect retro-future sound to play after the robotic uprising. Techie-friendly name-dropping abounds calling on everything from Ender’s Game to Aqua Teen Hunger Force and casually slipping in concept-appropriate terminology like mainframe, wifi and automaton. I wouldn’t be surprised if they find themselves playing the Penny Arcade Expo (especially with the absolutely magnificent Automata project Gabe and Tycho are working on), but I think they’re more accessible than that implies. Robots in Love is not a perfect EP (the closing track is confounding at best), but it’s got swaths of quality (I’m looking at you here, title track) that keep me hopeful for a quality full-length release in the future. Until then, upload these tracks to your neural net, access your dancing subroutines and proceed with the robot.
Yeah, I just did that. I’m sorry.