As we become more comfortable in the digital world, our tolerance for any discomfort in the physical world seems to decrease. We stand in the corner at the party looking at our phones to avoid making small talk; we let our eyes flit between screens to smother any thought that we might otherwise have to sit with alone. If this is what we do for fun, then what does work look like? As it turns out, it’s often indistinguishable. On Station on the Hill, the debut album from Vancouver noise-rock outfit Computer, alienation exists in nearly every aspect of contemporary life—work and play, it’s all the same, all the time. When the world seems like too much, Computer lean into discomfort and add to the noise.
Plenty of heavy bands address the theme of modern overstimulation, but few embody it so tangibly. “I got a new job today/With suits and shoes and socks/And everything paid/It’s all been leading up to this,” lead vocalist Ben Lock narrates over a noodling riff on “Weird New Vocation.” His unnamed job and the material pleasures it brings him—a bigger house, “a car with four doors/and four mirrors to see myself”—are supposed to add up to a better quality of life and a stronger sense of self, but they only lead to further disillusionment. He remains stoic as his self worth breaks down, his credo evolving from “I feel better about myself” to “I want to feel better about myself” to just “I want to feel better,” until the song is capped off by a violent outro that sounds like every instrument being thrown down a flight of stairs.
Computer have not been a band for long, but they have already demonstrated striking ambition and a voracious appetite. Station on the Hill is a cinderblock-dense collection of math rock, post-punk, hardcore, and occasional flourishes of klezmer (think early Black Country, New Road). It leaves little room to breathe, and the quieter moments are just as skin-crawling as their earsplitting counterparts. “The Bells” is a haunting, minute-long interlude consisting of reverberating chords and frizzled, incomprehensible chatter; it precedes the last and longest song, whose quiet passage of wavering saxophone and emo guitar twinkling underscore Lock’s trembling vocals. After two hard-and-fast rippers, “Now in a Vacuum” and “Concrete Vehicles,” the slow, minimalistic creep of “I’ll Follow” is like a hushed talking-to when you’re expecting to get yelled at—somehow dead-serious restraint is more grim than outright rage. One riff repeats while the drums grow louder and more metallic, at which point Lock repeats the song’s title, the word “follow” morphing into “fall low,” while Jackson Bell’s sax drowns him out.
