Review: BT’s These Hopeful Machines

Released last week, These Hopeful Machines came amidst much hype and fanfare, as BT’s fans were in a veritable frenzy over the album. And why not? Over the last 15 years, BT has put up a catalog where the B-sides outclass entire artists and the A-sides outclass, well, just about everything. Basically, BT is invincible when he’s on, and with every release there’s a hope that it will be the most on collection to date. Certainly, BT himself feels great about this release, noting in a video that for the first time an album of his feels complete to him upon release. You’d imagine that it’s hard to leave something out of a 1:52 long album, but never count BT out for having more ideas than 2 CDs can hold.

This is one of the strangest reviews I’ve done of any album or career. It has some weaknesses in areas that I value highly, but is one of the all-time best in several other categories so that it gets an ace rating from me despite my misgivings. In normal category order…

1) Chord sequences. The album is quite weak in its structures, with the evil I-V-VIm-IV showing up once and the typical trance VI-VII-Im showing up once and again. Given BT’s love of classical music and innovation and his jazz influences on This Binary Universe, it struck me as surprising and a letdown, but I suspect what’s going on is that BT adheres to a version of my theory of complexity creep, i.e. a single song can have only so much complexity to it before it loses meaning to the listener. You can only take the listener so far, and given that BT’s production and song forms are among the most experimental and complex of all time, maybe the concession to complexity creep is here. The most “out there” (the outest there?) track, “Le Nocturne de Lumiere,” confirms this, with only two chords going through it while the production goes insane. BT wasn’t intending to make simple music, so it’s likely that the chord sequences are simple to let everything else bounce off it and still make sense. Still, I can’t rank this category highly.

2) Song structure. The structure is so fluid throughout the album that BT in essence challenges previous ideas of what a song even is. The tracks are so fully developed that at the end you feel like they’ve assumed every possible iteration somewhere in there. Because of that fullness, other songs and albums feel short and undeveloped by comparison. I’ve never heard an album that dwarfs other albums like that. These don’t feel epic despite their length, because they twist and turn so often; instead, they make everything else feel short. Completely unique, which is a way of saying the album gets absurdly high marks here.

3) Mood. BT’s always been about mood, but the critical difference is that, unlike those trance albums that claim to take the listener on some quasi-spiritual “journey” and really just mean that the songs are kinda ambient trance, These Hopeful Machines has real mood swings and changes. When BT’s daughter sings the last chorus of “Forget Me” over chimes, the modern rock number changes gears completely, and you’re forced to reevaluate the chorus’s meaning as well as the entire previous song. That’s what mood changes should do. As for the moods themselves, they’re sometimes obscured by the glitchy production, but they’re still set effectively, and they’re juxtaposed extremely well.

4) Layers. There are plenty of layers of I-don’t-know-what under all that production; BT doesn’t ply his trade in minimalism. For once, though, I can’t hear them all too well, as the mixing/mastering process gave a very modern feel to the album. This may be an area where I haven’t heard the album through enough times to pick them out. We’ll say neutral to positive here.

5) Genre-bending. Several of the songs are both rock and electronic at once, particularly the leadoff single “Suddenly.” At different points one or the other takes over, but overall it’s almost 50% in each category. It’s rare not only to hit the middle dead-on, but it’s even rarer to make a song that is good in both categories. Electronic artists trying to straddle the rock fence often have their production techniques give them away, be it a drum machine taking the live feel off the rock or the guitar sounds being too synthesized to feel rockin’. This is the first electronica album I’ve heard where the rock actually feels like rock, and that authentic feel (aided by BT’s being able to play guitar well) gives it two broad genres instead of sounding like one is compromising the other. Compare this to any of Moby’s rock numbers and you’ll understand what I mean; when the songs need guitars and live drums, BT puts them in, and that alone is worth noting.

Besides that, the fluid song structures are such because it allows BT to insert any genre he feels like at any point in the song. It helps that he wrote a lot of these songs at new wave tempos and with that sort of feel (covering the Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” being the secret decoder ring there); new wave historically was one of the best rock-synth crossover genres, and that tempo allows trance and rock to co-exist peacefully. This album is masterful at genre-bending; just as it makes you question what a developed song is, it also makes you question what electronica and rock even mean. That’s power.

6) Innovation. If somehow you hadn’t picked this up reading so far, top marks for innovation, especially as those innovations go to question basic song construction concepts that no one’s really successfully challenged for a long time. Besides that, the morphing breakdown in “Le Nocturne de Lumiere” from 4/4 to 6/8 and then a slow-down is sick on the song structure and innovation route; it took very careful production to pull it off convincingly, but it’s perfectly presented.

7) Rhythm. The rhythms aren’t that complex this time around, and on the rock songs they’re a bit too simple (although, as noted earlier, they do feel like rock songs, so that’s the tradeoff, I suppose). There are tons of glitchy rhythmic elements present, but the beats are remarkably spartan. That’s not my idea of a good time, but oh well. I suppose too much beat might drown out the other things.

8) Production. BT lives up to the fact (not just my belief) that he is the best producer ever. Enough said.

9) Album flow. Without the thorough development of the songs, this album would feel choppy, a bunch of singles in different genres put on the same collection because it was time to release something. With that development, however, the songs all feel like they belong together, making the flow excellent (which is vital for something this long). It also helps that BT grouped his guest vocalists together, with only his own performances interspersed. It tends to annoy me for flow/authenticity reasons when an electronic artist uses about three vocalists evenly through an album; it’s very hard to make that feel like a unit. But by having the guest vocalists not “interrupt” each other, the album flows naturally, almost like Jes or Kirsty Hawkshaw or Rob Dickinson dropped in and then left. Indeed, the whole album feels like BT’s brain map, in a good way. “Over here, we have trance, while if you look to your right, you’ll see rock. Please feel free to purchase souvenirs from our gift shop.”

I don’t have a category for this, but BT’s vocals are top-notch. If you’ve heard him sing before, you know he’s always been more than serviceable, but it’s to the point where he’s better than his guest vocalists. Again, unlike Moby or someone of that ilk, BT’s voice also works in rock, which is necessary given how many times it shows up. The vocals are key to this album’s success, and on earlier albums I’m not sure his voice would have been up to it. It certainly is now; one listen to “Suddenly” and it’s clear he’s one of the best vocalists, guitarists, and producers in electronica today.

As mentioned, it’s very strange for me to put such high praise on an album where the chord sequences and rhythm (at least drum-wise) are pedestrian. But on song structure, genre-bending, innovation, production, and album flow, These Hopeful Machines is an historical landmark, redefining several musical ideas. I know I’m questioning my own song composition processes afresh after listening to this, and with it being so unique and iconic, I haven’t really been in the mood to listen to anything else since it came in the mail. I’m sure if you give it a chance that you’ll feel the same way.