FUTURE SO BLEAK, I GOTTA WEAR SHADES

This robot doesn’t fuck around telling you how you’re gonna get killed, either. There’ve been plenty of bleak musical projections of an impending doom on the horizon -- from the whacked out mutations of Devo’s "De-evolution" to nearly the entire canon of punk’s great lost hope to, more recently, bands such as Six Finger Satellite and Brainiac melding punk and postindustrial anxiety to predict a future tense. This Robot Kills spans some of these same synaptic gaps with a paranoid fervor, a desperate-sounding rage and the kind of idealism that reminds you that, indeed, there may be something wrong with "being watched" even though you now take it for granted. TRK’s lo-fi, analog synth stomps sound as rough around the edges as any self-respecting garage punk should, so don’t come to this cyborg slam with any notions of TRK’s muscle and sweat hidden under any digitized production. Even though they play with ’50s rock and ’70s punk conventions and clichés, don’t think TRK doesn’t mean it all. Destroy! Destroy!