Bachelorette

Cake Shop; Mon 15
Union Hall; Tue 16
South Street Seaport; July 3

Photograph: Annabel Alpers

At the dawn of the computer age, it was not uncommon for musicians to question mankind’s relationship with machines. This dialogue culminated in the human race’s nearest genetic link to machinery: Germans, specifically the Teutonic stereotype embodied by Kraftwerk. But now, people and machines are so intertwined that musicians tend to avoid the subject altogether. Protesting our computer dependence is like griping about oxygen.

On its new album, My Electric Family (Drag City), Bachelorette reopens the debate. Based in Christchurch, New Zealand, the band is primarily the brainchild of Annabel Alpers, whose previous LP was designed as a one-woman project. Here, she welcomes occasional foils—most brazenly the Royal New Zealand Air Force Brass Band, which makes its bid at indie-rock stardom on the hazy pop song “Dream Sequence.” But My Electric Family is dominated by Alpers’s off-center presence. In its emotional void, her singing seems neither traditionally male nor female, gliding across the album’s electronic pulse with the chill of another synthetic instrument.

At times, Alpers even resembles the tin men of Kraftwerk: “Technology boy attempts to live his life as a machine,” she sings in “Technology Boy,” eerily enunciating every syllable. More patently, a video for “Her Rotating Head” finds a robot holding a detached human mask, which sings from the robot’s cold grip as images of preliberated women dance and type in the background. It prompts the questions: Which terrifying world does Alpers prefer? And which is represented onstage?—Jay Ruttenberg

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