The Melancholy Sound of the Synth

Pretend you're on a train in the summer of 2008. You're going west, going back home, having dropped the person you love off at the airport to not see them or hear their voice for three-and-a-half months. (The Africa-Asia trip was in the picture long before you were). You're taking a month to travel from New York to Seattle, via six other cities. You compulsively download new singles to keep you company. You become a radio station, playing the same songs every hour, on the hour.

The hottest hits are different from real radio's: Lloyd's "Girls Around the World," cadging a groove from Coldcut's classic Eric B. & Rakim remix, is barely Hot 100 in the real world but an easy No. 1 internally. There's Hotstylz and Yung Joc's "Lookin Boy," a very fast and very funny dozens routine; Alphabeat's "Fascination," a song obsessed with an earlier '80s; the Mole's 14-minute disco screamer "Baby You're the One"; Reba McEntire and Kenny Chesney's divorced-parent weeper "Every Other Weekend."

So much, so many directions: That's when music is alive. Robert Christgau recently posited (at the EMP Pop Conference in Seattle) that one reason he values music is that it's a way to understand people who are not like yourself. Moving at Amtrak speed and at Amtrak hours, you get plenty of that: the kid with a hand in every community and staged event in Olympia, Washington, from theater to all-ages shows; the leg-shot soldier teaching you gambling card games (you have to insist on no money); the Southern woman with a son prone to Tourettic outbursts and spasms three seats behind. When the son swears and shakes, the woman holds him down and demands that he apologize to Jesus. You keep distracting yourself with Fred Falke's remix of the Whitest Boy Alive's "Golden Cage." You won't realize it for another month, but this is your favorite song, in part because it sounds like the radio when you were nine years old.

That would be back in 1984, right in the teeth of an American pop-radio renaissance ruled by big, bright, brazen synthesizers, echoing the confident period following MTV's ascent, when Michael Jackson, Prince, Van Halen, Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, ZZ Top and many more utilized the machines to boost excellent material. Then things got bad. The becalmed synth washes of Brian Eno had become the unctuous backdrop to Mike + the Mechanics '"The Living Years." Madonna's confident disco redux flat-lined into Paula Abdul in six short years. The synthesizer had symbolized the Imperial '80s, and nothing caught the mood better than Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel, American Psycho, whose narrator is obsessed with the sterile synth-based production of Phil Collins and Huey Lewis and the News. Synths grew more sophisticated and records began to sound more organic.

Not forever, of course: Nostalgia, too, sets in quickly, and the '80s synth has been enjoying a boom. Often, it's just there as the texture du jour; but other times it reaches us in a more complicated manner. After all, nostalgia breeds melancholy. But while the synths 'age suggests a retreat to a more innocent time — the machine sounds have taken on retrospective warmth — the '80s were anything but innocent. The synths 'inorganic sheen reflects this, too, and in so doing complicates our nostalgia — which is already in a strange place, because hearing these synths again, we basically pine for futurism past.

Take two songs from MGMT's 2008 Oracular Spectacular. "Electric Feel," is a terrific single: the Prince synths (and coy falsetto) work as a sonic wink as well as for their own sake. But that trick has a lesser dimension than the whining keyboard hook of "Time to Pretend," which serves to underline the excesses depicted in the lyrics. "I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars/ You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars/ This is our decision, to live fast and die young/ We've got the vision, now let's have some fun": the plastic synth, the sound of the expensive '80s good life, helps outline a dream of all-conquering rock stardom that's undergoing as much erosion as any other symbol of old media.

This particular mountain can never be climbed the same way, and — since the near-collapse of the banks in September 2008 — chances are even dreaming of something like it again is more futile than it's ever been. All of this is brought home in MGMT's music by the sonic symbol of rampant capitalism. (MGMT's 2010 Congratulations goes deeper into psychedelic '60s and '70s instrumentation, leaving the boxier '80s behind — for now.)

If we need a calendar date when the melancholy synth begins, it's March 13, 2001, the day Discovery, by Paris's Daft Punk, was released. The album's greatest hit was "Digital Love," which is built on a guitar riff sent slowly through a filter, and features the world's funniest keytar solo. It's also heartbreakingly beautiful, and the reason is in its kitsch futurism. It struck me dumb the first time I heard it: suddenly, the reviled-by-history sound of my growing up had flipped into not only nostalgia, but longing for a time when what had once seemed antiquated was the harbinger of an unimaginably expanded palate. Our ears were jaded from too many options even in 2001; today, if anything, the fallible aspects of plastic '80s synths are intrinsic to their appeal — the occasionally queer pitching, bursts of hiss surrounding notes on an especially cheap keyboard, and particularly unnatural tones.

The discography of Daft Punk's Parisian house comrade Fred Falke is practically a shrine to plastic-synthdom. Falke's reworkings tend to take inspiration from specific '80s acts: his reworking of Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks" is very late-OMD, for example, and his treatment of Eric Prydz's "Pjanoo" is an obvious hat-tip to Jan Hammer's synthesized soundtrack for NBC's Miami Vice (which premiered in '84). That's the sound he uses on the Whitest Boy Alive's "Golden Cage, as well. And the first couple of times through, it sounds funny: The central riff is a pixie-dust parody of the kind of triumphalism in an archetypal cheesy-'80s-synth riff like Europe's "The Final Countdown." But the chords and tone are milky and thus warm, full of affection, even as, much as "Digital Love" did, Falke dares you to not to laugh.

That's before the song comes in: The Whitest Boy Alive is a band led by Erlend Øye, of Kings of Convenience, who is also a dance DJ. Øye's lyric is about being lost in time and memory, not knowing the outcome of his distance from someone. Falke's after-school-special music fits perfectly: Loss in time and memory coordinate with the nostalgic synths. The trilling keyboard lines (there are several, no one getting in the other's way) buoy Øye's depressive reverie; he brings their flutter down to earth. Not fully knowing the future enlivens you to melancholy underneath the surface; when Falke takes away the drums but keeps the synth pulse going beneath Øye's profession that "I also felt this way when I was still with you," there's a total sense of suspension that befits being temporarily homeless, chugging through the states, with the future in the air.

Now pretend you're in a loft in Soho. Both trips went fine; she got back in one piece and promptly moved east, staying with her parents while pursuing a doctorate. Her folks are out of town for two months; you're trying it out again. It's a relief to feel normal about New York again, and to be with your girlfriend full-time after 14 months of short visits. Taking the train to Minneapolis for a weekend, then Manhattan, doesn't have the momentum of last year's trip. This is something else entirely, something music doesn't impact nearly as much. That happens when you're settled in. The apartment is big and spacious, which helps.

'80s synths, of course, are everywhere now: R&B and hip-hop in particular are undergoing a heavy electro-funk phase. Most of the interesting new club records make heavy use of '80s synths — the pugnacious English producer Joker calls his sound "purple" which, given how Prince-like it sounds, is only fair. Things have come full circle on the '80s synth — it now signals a new kind of authenticity, when plastic electronics signaled creativity rather than bloat.

In the Soho apartment, the track that really gets to you has a kind of melancholy similar to Falke's "Golden Cage" remix. Walter Jones's "Living Without Your Love" is the B-side of a 12-inch on DFA Records, is the label run by James Murphy, singer-songwriter of LCD Soundsystem. Time and memory are among Murphy's lyrical preoccupations, and DFA reflects that as well. "Living Without Your Love" is a medium-tempo boogie, the kind of thing you'd hear in abundance during 1982; Jones's groove has the low-res gloss typical of black pop after disco and before the crossover dollar began to beckon.

Besides some light na-na-yeah semi-ad libs, all that is sung is the title phrase over boxy synths with a finish so shiny they give the effect of walling the world out. However sure-footed Jones's funk groove is, there's an uncertainty to "Living Without Your Love" that tugs at you, turns one listen into four, warps your sense of time. The easy tempo invites contemplation, the synths never seem to look up, which gives the track a powerfully introspective feel. In its way, the record brings the '80s synth revival full circle: it pines for simpler times (that's what the title implies), with music that lets us know that things can never be so simple again.