Various Artists - PC Music, Vol. 2

Pitchfork 62

Three years out from PC Music’s inception, it would be rash to deny the label/genre/cultural microphenomenon’s influence—not just in terms of the sheer number of think-pieces generated in its wake, but in the trickle-down of its aesthetic signatures. Take, for example, the breathy single “3 Strikes” by maybe-Kylie Jenner-fronted teen-pop act Terror Jr. The song’s otherwise unimaginative pop skeleton (lilting beat, insipid lyrics) is rendered magnetic through chilly vocal manipulation and melodic elements, which are at once dreamlike and austere. In other words, it sounds like an A.G. Cook production on a fistful of downers. This is not to mention the expertly-constructed hype around the band itself: an anonymous female vocalist, a debut via a lipgloss advertisement—straight from the PC playbook.

Gradually seeping into the mainstream is par for the course for electronic music subcultures, but Cook and company are a bit more insistent in the totality of their goals. By one description, 2016 is the year that PC Music “grabbed the mainstream by the throat and made it take notice.” But listening to the PC Music, Vol. 2 compilation, I felt less subsumed and more worn out. Is it feasible for a microgenre that’s all candy-coating, all self-consciously hyper-“contemporary” veneer, to expect to sustain itself long-term? And, while this perhaps overestimates the sincerity of PC Music’s mission, is it possible that such mainstream-seizing objectives are built around a faulty understanding of how culture flows?

In any event, PC Music, Vol. 2 collects 10 tracks, most previously released, which follow the blueprint laid out by last year’s Vol. 1. Though the tracks clock in at varying degrees of hyperactivity (GFOTY’s full-throttle “Poison” perhaps the worst of the bunch for the high-BPM-averse), each reaches for anthem status. The productions cobble together and iron over a mix of styles appropriated from both the dance underground and Top 40, with results that are structurally varied, but with a uniform surface. Among the better offerings is easyFun’s “Monopoly,” whose bouncy hook is propelled by clean synths and infantile vocal manipulation. Felicita’s “a new family” seethes, horror-film whispers emerging from underneath the sort of crunchy torrent of sound favored by so-called post-club producers. Some songs bridge directly into a stylized take on radio pop—Danny L Harle’s Carly Rae Jepsen-featuring “Super Natural,” for example, a disquietingly innocent hit that could easily have been underwritten by the Disney Channel. If this compilation evidences any real evolution in the PC Music sound, it’s in this assimilated direction: less sinister, more widely marketable.

As a conceptual project that embraces HD aesthetics wholesale, PC Music has always felt dated to me; it’s in this context that comparisons to post-internet art—variously unflattering to either camp, depending on your vantage point—seem most apt. Its desire to comment on the hypermediated nature of being young today is similarly tiresome: lyrics often conjure a lonely girl on her phone, waiting for a notification to advance the plot, a rather flattened image of sexuality and longing. Can’t we agree by now that, however smooth our screens, technology tends more often to reveal and amplify an inherent messiness in human relationships? This is not to mention the genre’s overwhelming whiteness, or its tendency to treat women as avatars, recurring points that rather definitively undermine PC Music’s critical capabilities.

But a masterfully constructed pop song can be indelible, and if you peel back the ill-advised art-project histrionics, there are a handful of those here. Harle’s “Broken Flowers,” first released in 2013, is an excellent piece of cyborg house, addictive but never overwhelming. “Only You,” by Chinese pop star Chris Lee—one of the biggest-ticket names and a rare non-white collaborator, it is worth noting, for a group of producers so transparently indebted to East Asian pop culture—builds at a treacly pace, as the minimalist structure fills with textural scrawls that cut the sweetness. It’s this, not the messaging, that is worth hanging onto.