Pitchfork

A few months ago, an mp3 circulated of David Lee Roth's isolated vocal track from the original version of "Runnin' With the Devil". For some it was a fascinating glimpse at Diamond Dave's hyper-stylized faux-blues wail, stripped bare of the Van Halen brothers' virtuosity. For most, it was pure comedy gold-- long gaps of silence pierced by a cartoonish falsetto croak-- that quickly gave way to the realization that, wow, as great a song as that is, David Lee Roth is, technically, a pretty shitty singer.

The moral: A voice alone, especially one that doesn't add up to much more than a well-intentioned set of signifiers, does not a great band make. Freddie Mercury had some killer pipes, but he also had Brian May and the uncanny ability to craft wonderful pop melodies. Aaron Behrens, the vocalist for Austin's Next Big Thing Ghostland Observatory, is the latest in a long line of supplicants to the Queen leader's throne. Ghostland's schtick doesn't go much further than Behren's pipes and prance, on which the duo relies to fill in the significant gaps of Thomas Ross Turner's spare electronics. Sure, Behrens' voice is a fairly good bar-band approximation of hair metal timbral wankery, yet Turner's sketchy electro backdrops provide only the most rudimentary assistance. The album's title-- a semantic nod to a certain pair of majestic French robots-- is pure wishful thinking.

Robotique Majestique, which opens with the instrumental "Opening Credits" and includes meandering instrumentals for nearly a third of its 39 minutes, could have worked well as the score of a 1981 techno-horror shlock-fest. "Dancin' on My Grave"-- passable synth pop that circles around a solid hook without ever landing-- would have run under the closing credits, but here, it's the only even slightly recommendable moment, the highlight of one song after another that finds ways to excise the energy and excitement from dance music. "Heavy Heart", the title track, and the Downward Spiral pastiche "HFM" rely on Behrens' empty vocal histrionics to carry the songs, but they don't gloss as much more than extended glam-vamps. Like hearing DLR's lonely voice doing its best in the absence of accompaniment, most of Robotique is just sort of depressing.

Pop trends and genre hybrids don't just fall out of the sky; despite all signs pointing toward unlimited choice and fan freedom during industry restructuring and p2p smash-and-grab, repertoires are still being created to fill market gaps. In those terms, Ghostland Observatory are even more depressing: They're a duo, one of whom wears a cape while the other patrols the stage howling atop generic electronic noodling-- not dissimilar from recent Columbia signees and Of Montreal tour openers MGMT. In addition, the first time I heard of Ghostland Observatory was from a DVD sent to me of their December '07 "Austin City Limits" gig, coming on the strength of two completely-ignored self-released records on a self-created label (it doesn't hurt that they're from Austin, but c'mon). And: They've already played Lollapalooza twice and appeared on freakin' Conan. I'll guess they'll sell 150k of Robotique and stick around to haunt us with their Daft Punk-for-frat-boys schtick for years to come. Boo.