Pitchfork

"It's time to forget all you've heard," Slumber Party's Aliccia Berg declares on her band's fourth album, which will come as good news to those of us who've felt her group has always been a little too much slumber and not enough party. Up till now, Slumber Party's revolving-door roster-- with Berg being the lone constant-- has enlisted pretty much every female in the Detroit area who's ever owned a Spacemen 3 album (a demographic that amounts to about 10 people). But for Musik, Berg revitalizes her band's usual stoned-out strumming with a space-age bachelorette pad makeover that serves to blur the line between the narcotic and robotic.

While the fuzz-disco opener "10-9-8-7-6-5-4" suggests a brazen break from form, Musik doesn't attempt to upend the band's Velvet Undergrounded roots as connect them to a more far-reaching psychedelic lineage. The album still features its share of typically slack Nehru-jacket jams ("Destruction/Construction"), rose-tinted lullabies ("Becuz"), and 1970s AM-radio throwbacks ("Madeupmind"), but Musik feels most alive when past and future collide and synthesize, like on "Thin Is Wide" (the song that gives this review its opening line), where a hypnotic bed-track of analog electro drones and Eastern-tinged guitar motifs clear the way for Berg's laser-guided melody. It's a DIY sci-fi aesthetic that immediately brings to mind Broadcast's proudly minimal 2005 release, Tender Buttons, with songs built upon skeletal synth patterns that sound like they could be played with two fingers, let alone the nine players listed in Musik's liners.

But Musik's spare arrangements are ably filled out by more playful yet assertive vocal performances from Berg; while she's not about to shake off the perennial Nico comparisons, Berg takes advantage of the empty space between the dots and loops by offering uncharacteristically pointed observations about sexual politics. "So Sick" comes off like Kraftwerk's "The Model" rewritten from the title subject's perspective, with a disarmingly cheerful opening verse-- "Want to make myself look so sick...if I can do that I can do anything"-- that reveals all the mind games and body politicking that go into maintaining austere appearances. "Boys/Girls" is more lightheartedly satirical, skewering the Women are From Venus, Men are From Mars supermarket paperback approach to battle-of-the-sexes delineations ("I'm a shopaholic/ I like to dance/ You're an alcoholic") over a fun-fun-fun-on-the-autobahn melody that plays up the connection between Berg's android delivery and the lyric's binary logic. But even when she's addressing broader issues of gender, Berg's songwriting tilts more to the personal than polemical, preferring to read between the sheets than make blanket statements.

Her focus on the intimate also helps explain why Slumber Party's most vibrant album to date ends with arguably the most downcast song in the band's entire repertoire: "Electric Cave," essentially a piano ballad version of Romeo & Juliet as recited by Eleanor Friedberger, a tragic tale that feels all the more tragic because one of the principals survives. But even in this most sullen of moments, the real benefits of Musik's more animated electro exercises are still evident, as they've inspired Berg to become the sort of singer that will look you straight in the eye where she once hid behind her bangs.