Tuesday, December 7, 2021

Album Review: Computer Girl - Computer Girl EP


Computer Girl is Oklahoma Duo Hannah Edmondson and Christopher Raun, who have, as of yet, one album to their name, and it's a self-titled EP. They perform a kind of indie rock that is melody forward and deceptively layered, communicating sturdily plotted narratives of isolation with highly visual lyrics.

They also take a great deal of care to balance these more traditionally laudable song elements with slickly buffed and digitally divergent sound textures that push you out of the flux of casual listening while continuing to grip you in the orbit of their captivating centrifugal force. There are moments when they sound like Cat Power and other times when they highly resemble good, early St. Vincent, but at all times, Computer Girl is testing their signal strength and finding ways to upgrade their performance, while defining the shape and boundaries to the shadows cast by the LED illumination pools into which we endlessly submerge our consciousnesses. Are we baptized or drowned in the light of the computer monitor? It's hard to tell as life and death are of the same experiential quality in the weightless womb of the web. 

The glitchy, sapiently scuffy and fine detailed, information rerouting and cartography that Computer Girl performs is evocative of the ways in which we are captured by technology, as well as our natural and self-preserving strain against these silicon shackles. It would have been very easy for Computer Girl's music to be a lot less interesting than it is, but I'm glad we don't live in that world. 

Computer Girl EP is self-released.