Madds Buckley -- A Simple Binary and a Complex Phrase
Madds Buckley creates a pastiche of hypnotic pop with her interrogation of humans and machines on A Simple Binary and a Complex Phrase.
Madds Buckley creates whole worlds in her sneakily hypnotic pop with a psychedelic twirl and glitchy Nintendo graphics. At least, it feels that way when you hear her brand new album, A Simple Binary and a Complex Phrase. The spliced sounds would almost be robotic if Buckley's vocals were anything but stretched by the weight of the world and emitting electroshocks. What you get across 12 songs is a colorful wonderland of questions about the enmeshment of humans and machines, a predicament society currently faces with the astronomical rise of AI in every part of our lives.
"Overboard" contains frayed ends which Buckley tapes over with candy confection for a sky-defying hook that rivals all the pop girlies on mainstream radio. "I'm poking holes when I shouldn't / Saying things that I wouldn't," she spits the water out of her lungs. "No going back after this / I'm going down with this ship."
Buckley also demonstrates a serious knack for Bonnie McKee-sized hooks elsewhere with the fluttering "Hate That," a light-bending, dreamy ode to love-torn desire, and "Coded Ways," which feels ripped from the 1990s Nintendo video game, Mega Man. Its sugary blips and bloops conjure up 16 non-stop hours of playing video games until 6 in the morning and downing a four-pack of Red Bull. The fizzy indie pop sends sonic bubbles that tickle the ear lobes before immersing the eardrums in pure pleasure.
A Simple Binary and a Complex Phrase also includes plenty of organic compositions. Buckley plucks a guitar with a steady rhythmic heartbeat on "Battery Forming," while the very next song, "Tomes and Tombstones," guns for a black stallion giddy-up to the horizon's edge. "I can't remember how my young face got to here / I just know that I'm older," she considers with the devastating "Memory Loss," an exhumation about losing self, time, and memory before the whole world vanishes like an evaporated dew drop.
"The tear-stained pages are taken up by you," Buckley flicks her tongue over the unwavering gallop of "Archivist," reminiscent of Kacey Musgraves' "The Alchemist" – with a slight perspective shift and a more discernible genre fusion. The late-bloomer melts synthetic and organic into a malformed, yet elegant, statuette of genre play, quite a special career moment.
Separately, every song feels like it belongs on a different album. But together, they delightfully fit together like puzzle pieces. You can experience the greater concept around the tension between humanity's existential crisis and a futuristic, robot cell takeover. It's not some far-off idea either; it's happening in our lives, whether through our phone screeners and TV sets or in hushed gossip while in line at the grocery store.
A Simple Binary and a Complex Phrase might take a few careful listens to understand the threads holding it precariously together. That's art for you. It can take a minute to digest and access before plunging into a knee-jerk reaction. Madds Buckley deserves focused attention, and we can certainly oblige.
