Introducing us to New Zealand singleton Annabel Alpers’ expanding brood, My Electric Family is a charming ruse. From bringing on board collaborators – an entire Kiwi brass band for the beaming ‘Dream Sequence’ – to creating a smooth flow between synthetic and acoustic, the album warmly broadens the textures found on her debut, the tellingly titled Isolation Loops. Discard lingering thoughts of “bedroom pop”, however – even if much of it is self-recorded. This is a dynamic and multihued, if at times oddly distant journey through electronic fields. Alpers’ multi-accented voice – part European electro-vixen, part Kiwi, part Enya – shines through varying excursions into disco throwback (‘Mindwarp’), pastoral oddity (‘Instructions for Insomniacs’), austere urban dystopia (‘The National Grid’) and many other interesting angles and techno-kitsch references.

But while it brims with novel sounds and moments, so much of My Electric Family amounts to little more than just that – novelty. Alpers happily admits she has no particular direction with Bachelorette and while this unfiltered M.O. gleans certain treasures, there’s a nagging feeling that the album might just wander off. Its first half stone-skips over textures, never fully committing to any in particular, while the second drifts mainly into space-pop psych-outs and atmospherics – all good vibes, but nothing that really sticks. It’s like looking at a set of plans but not a house.

Some might say the tiresome human-machine theme that apparently frames the album offers a unifying drive, only problem being it’s too vaguely articulated to work as a clinch. Alpers says the title recalls the difficult musical and social contract we have with technology, but technology here is such a nebulous lyrical motif that she fails to yield any real insight into the specific struggles and desires in our tangle with machinery.

Rather, if pressed to identify a dominant mood here, I guess it’s a kind of computerised catatonia, the endless indifference of 1s and 0s. There’s a sense of emotion in Alpers voice, but exactly what she’s feeling is unsure: should we be celebrating or protesting? Similarly, composition on a computer has rendered a listless family of sounds, superficially distinct in their musical origins (disco, Krautrock, psych, etc.) but underneath it all a kitschy pick’n’mix uniformity. The result is alluring, but ultimately the blue flower in a land of technology.

by Lawson Fletcher