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In this post-truth, post-trust era, the assurance that all systems are lying can feel oddly comforting. Floating on flux rather than guided by facts, we can liberate ourselves from the institutions and verities that are no longer stable or credible. Rely on “my truth” instead and indulge self-gratifying private urges: “I wanna run free / With the music / A beautiful mistake / Try not to lose it / Faster all the time / Smoke and abuse it … / Play the wrong chord / Say something stupid.”
Those lines are from the new Soulwax release, All Systems Are Lying. It’s been eight years since their last one and arguably much longer than that: their previous album, From Deewee (2017), was recorded in one live take with a session band that included three drummers. (You have to go all the way back to 2004’s Any Minute Now to find a traditionally tracked Soulwax LP).
All Systems Are Lying has a creative conceit of its own: It’s a “rock album made without any electric guitars”, according to David and Stephen Dewaele, the Belgian brothers behind Soulwax, “built entirely from modular synths, live drums, tape machines, and processed vocals”. The record is billed as “a fractured mirror held up to modern society on the brink—where truth is distorted by filters, algorithms and noise”. Also see OK Computer and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, not to mention Spoon‘s Hot Thoughts (2017), which used a similar Oulipian approach, omitting acoustic guitars and relying primarily on synths, percussion, and studio craft for its construction. (It’s perhaps no surprise that All Systems Are Lying occasionally calls Spoon’s music to mind.)
In addition to maintaining Soulwax, the Dewaele brothers are accomplished DJs and remixers of some of the most beloved dance music of the last 20 years (e.g., tracks by Daft Punk and LCD Soundsystem). They’ve long been experts in the advanced sciences of moving bodies on a dance floor, but All Systems Are Lying finds them contemplating the drawing board. “We’ve got to find a more efficient way / We’ve got to try to find another way”, muses the almost motionless “Constant Happiness Machine”, which has no drums as well as no guitars.
That song’s successor, the pitiless, march-like, not very danceable “Polaris”, keeps telling us: “You don’t seem to realize / You don’t seem to realize / It’s happening right in front of you.” Having put us on alert with that unsettling reminder, the Dewaeles turn the surveillance cam on us: “It’s happening all because of you.” We may be increasingly powerless drones, but we are nonetheless to blame for our own “modern society on the brink”, as when a nation elects to the seats of power precisely the officials who will abuse the systems they now control to increase their wealth and power, and our peril, poverty, and pain.
The unspoken word here is fascism, of course, and one of the canniest things about All Systems Are Lying is that it is both a critique and an example. “Have I told you how I feel? / Have I sold you what to feel?” asks the menacing narrator of the spooky “Meanwhile on the Continent”. Most of the album’s songs are delivered in the persona of an omniscient (if not omnipresent/omnipotent) Übermensch, perhaps a cyborg, or even a bodiless and sinister authoritarian AI: a “Constant Happiness Machine” that pitilessly delivers an “Engineered Fantasy” (the title of another song) to mere humans—a fantasy that is “just for you / Not for me”, promises a robotic voice who is “here for business, baby, not for fun” (later “business class”).
It might seem cheering to hear that we flesh-and-blood creatures are “Hot Like Sahara”, a song that rocks like Lenny Kravitz (if it had guitars) and also cooks; but that’s only because the whole earth is cooking, and “we never had a say in this” either, and “even the sea will be sold”. Yet, like everything else, it’s (y)our fault: “You danced around / Damage is done / Air conditioned rooms.”
In the end, we’re a civilization of “Idiots in Love”, which could also be a Lenny Kravitz song. Idiots in love with what, though? It’s hard to tell; certainly not with each other: “There is no afterlife / I’m going home alone tonight / Border walls are gonna fall.” It sounds like some terrifying cinematic Eurodystopia: either a picture of a frantic revolution or, more likely, the quashing of one.
What we idiots are really in love with is enumerated near the album’s end on the herky-jerky, LCD Soundsystem-like funk of “False Economy”, which smashes the idols of personal indulgence, decision, and projection, and refutes the voice of public officialdom: “Your melodies and tears … public safety brief … blackmail of ‘likes’… curated playlist … endless updates … potential matches … humblebrags … tiny Ziploc bags.” These are the factitious transactions of the false economy, and the reasons why “it’s happening all because of [us]”: We feed ourselves into the system, and the system metabolizes our substance into lies that are fed back.
“I always hated what you liked,” the song’s narrator coolly declaims. “I let the market decide,” but the Dewaeles know full well that the market is the most lying system of all, and that the music Soulwax creates (and we buy, or don’t) is part of that system. They’re selling you what to feel, or at least what to think, while you listen to this enjoyable, very efficient album that never plays the wrong chord or says something stupid, doesn’t need guitars to rock, and delivers its message in concentrated and relentless doses.
The more you listen to this record, the less comforting and more frightening it becomes. It all starts on the very first track, a spacey intro (with a strong resemblance to Spoon’s “The Ghost of You Lingers”) that repeats its title, “Pills and People Gone”, some 22 times. That’s how it reads on the lyric sheet, anyway. What your ears hear, thanks to those “processed vocals”, is “pills and people get along” and the more disturbing “guilty people get along”. It’s happening all because of you. Reach for your tiny Ziploc bag, smoke and abuse it, but you can’t run free with the music. All systems are lying—including this one?
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Adam Sobsey
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