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Electro emotions
Dot Allison and Sing-Sing
BY ANNIE ZALESKI

Blame it on the relatively new and painfully self-aware electroclash movement, or a hipster tendency to appropriate only the more stoic aspects of new wave, but it’s just not cool right now to combine emotion with electronica. Refrigerated beats, boredom, and basic black are in; admitting non-ironic vulnerability or honest-to-God feeling is out. Fortunately, someone forgot to tell Dot Allison, whose second solo album, We Are Science (Mantra/Beggars Banquet), is a pop-electro hybrid that resonates with as much emotion as style. Thanks to programming by Two Lone Swordsmen wizard Keith Tenniswood — whose other half, Andrew Weatherall, produced Allison’s former group, One Dove — Science is closer in spirit to One Dove’s dance-floor-pounding dub pop than to the sugary shoegazing of her 1999 Afterglow (Heavenly/Arista). In fact, Science uses its synths to plug directly into the personal.

It might be tempting at first to think otherwise. Allison’s vocals can be girlishly aloof and disaffected. The album’s sterile title, along with "We’re Only Science" and "You Can Be Replaced," brings to mind robot factories and Kraftwerkian techno extremes — not exactly warm and fuzzy reference points. Yet Allison finds the same human pulse that Kraftwerk moved to in their best work, though the human desires she evokes have an ominous overtone.

The synth hook that defines "I Think I Love You" oscillates like the intro to Nine Inch Nails’ "Head like a Hole," and that’s a perfect match for the song’s desperate — and apparently unrequited — declarations of affection. The title track pulses to twitching beats and seductive keyboard textures as Allison drawls, "Look into my eyes/For the last time/Can you read my lips?/You’re over time." "Make It Happen," with its tinny drum-machine beat and big bass bottom, expresses further vengeance as Allison asks, "How does it feel to know that this is real?" Even the wistful "Wishing Stone," with its watery acoustic-guitar backing, finds her noting, "Now you’re bleeding faster."

Allison’s crazed passion surfaces most openly on "Wishing" and "Love You." But the matter-of-fact way she conveys unsettling phrases is what makes Science so chilling. She might appear detached, but behind that mask of indifference, calculated emotion — from outright menace to bruised innocence — peer out.

Allison’s fellow UK chanteuses in Sing-Sing know a little something about applying electronic textures to emotional music. Emma Anderson, one of Sing-Sing’s founders, helped popularize the trend as a guitarist/vocalist in the dream-pop band Lush. And the band’s debut, The Joy of Sing-Sing (Manifesto), does at times wander into the ethereal fog Lush regularly traversed. "Everything" is a lullaby where soft layers of strings, guitars, and glittering keyboards frame vocalist Lisa O’Neill’s sighs. "Me and My Friend" is gentle trip-hop with angelic, gauzy echoes.

But in contrast to Lush’s often sinister darkness, Sing-Sing offer electronic pop bathed in warmth and surrounded by bright, crisp instrumental hooks and summery feelings. Give credit mostly to O’Neill, whose voice has a chirpy, delicate quality that recalls Harriet Wheeler of the Sundays or Sarah Cracknell of St. Etienne. Her accordion-laden duet with Departure Lounge’s Tim Keegan, a hidden track on The Joy of Sing-Sing, brings to mind a European café, and "Feels like Summer," originally released on former Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie’s label Bella Union, is a gloriously sticky mess of torchy guitar and swinging ’60s style. Rich trumpets, Hammond organ, and chiming choruses of "doo-doo-doo" and "bah-da-bah-bah" from O’Neill make "Far Away from Love" as catchy as it is wholesome.

At their ebullient live performance at T.T. the Bear’s Place a couple months back, O’Neill proved herself to be Sing-Sing’s strongest asset. Dressed all in white with traces of teal eyeshadow, she demanded attention with a strident vocal performance that the album’s coy sweetness and layered instruments only hint at. Keyboardist Jenny Jones was in the background — both on stage and in the music — but Anderson’s ringing guitar riffs and Darren Grocutt’s concise drumming framed her synthpop structures with passionate force.

Although only snatches of lyrics are decipherable on Joy, it wasn’t until their encore that Sing-Sing sacrificed clarity for indistinct guitar drones. Yet the wall of noise burst with plenty of joyous enthusiasm — even at their haziest, this band still wear their hearts on their sleeve. It’s a different approach to electronic pop from Allison’s demure reserve, but it has the same effect: the emotionalism of The Joy of Sing-Sing is every bit as vivid as that of We Are Science.

Issue Date: December 19 - 26, 2002
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