Album Of The Week: Big Ups Eighteen Hours Of Static

There's a moment on "TMI" where Big Ups frontman Joe Galarraga tries to talk like a robot and totally fails. He literally says, "I am a robot from the 20th century / I am designed to never feel anything" in a spaced-out monotone that seems to serve as his version of the beep-bop-borp robot voice you learned in kindergarten. While he's doing that voice, his band's guitars stop their usual slash-and-burn stuff and instead go into a tense little tick-tock that seems like it's supposed to be mechanistic. Here's the problem: The New York band simply cannot do mechanstic. It's not part of their language. But then, that's not really a problem at all. On Eighteen Hours Of Static, their transcendent tantrum of a debut album, the New York band plays post-hardcore as something other than a here's-our-genre affectation; they play it like this seesawing cathartic moment is the only thing saving them from some deep chasm of unfeeling depression. And that's why the robot voice doesn't work: The band can't help but radiate a sort of physical instability. Even when they're trying to sound remote and emotionless, they still seem like they're seconds away from breaking.