Her Space Holiday
The Young Machines (Mush) Listening to Marc Bianchi’s newest is like hearing the sound of a close friend’s heart imploding: quiet, insistent, sweetly swollen, and shot through with enough retroactive disappointment to make you want to hand the poor fellow a copy of Pet Sounds, and possibly a Xanax or two. As far as the shattered relationship genre of lulling dream pop, The Young Machines is a near perfect chronicle of slow-building sorrow, founded on gentle swells of plaintive electronic beats, lushly building strings, and Bianchi’s soft, painfully lonely voice. When he sings, “This bed gets so damn cold, I hate sleeping here alone, but it’s all right, this feeling is well deserved, I’ve been owed all this hurt for a long time,” on “The Luxury of Loneliness,” it’s enough to make you cry, and it does. At times, the melodies here tread the same slick-with-tears floorboards of Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service, but Bianchi’s ambient heartsickness is more poignant and emotionally naked, swimming in a pitching sea of self-recrimination and crested with a gorgeous misery. Please, someone give Bianchi a hug before he’s found dangling in a closet somewhere. An artist capable of music this brutally affecting is simply too exquisite to lose.
This article appears in November 7 • 2003.