Insects vs Robots – Theyllkillyaa

(Los Angeles) They said it couldn’t be done, but once again the genre-mashing, convention-defying band Insects vs Robots sails over its own high bar with an album that defies convention and demands attention.

TheyllKillYaa takes seemingly incompatible elements, from bitter social commentary to neo-slapstick humor to smatterings of ancient Danish folk music, crams it all into the blender built from their collective imagination, hits Go and pours out a stiff shot of music unlike any other on the planet today.

Of course, this is business as usual for the psychedelic freak-folk-rock space-punk gnome orchestra known as Insects vs Robots. Since coming together in 2008, Micah Nelson (charango, guitar, vocals, percussion, piano, drums), Jeff “FEJ” Smith (bass, grooves), Tony “Grandma” Peluso (drums, percussion, synths), Milo Gonzalez (electric and acoustic guitars, vocals) and Nikita Sorokin (violin, guitar, banjo, vocals) released three albums: Geryl and the Great Homunculous (2009), Tales from the Blue House (2011) and Insects vs Robots (2014), each an inspiration to free thinkers and listeners.

Media have taken note of IvR’s fearless creativity over the years, Rolling Stone noting the band’s “trippy song structures, surrealist lyrics, heavy percussive elements and jazzy improvisational guitar lines,” which of course was why “the band won the early crowd over with their experimental spirit and youthful enthusiasm.” And according to Nerdist.com, “the band completely embodies their wonky aqueous descriptor in full: Think laser beams shooting over the delicate plucks of ukulele and lyrics about the inevitable implosion of the Earth.”

Impressive though that is, Nelson insists that “we’ve grown a lot since our last album. Our sound has evolved quite a bit. Our band is an organic reaction to this apocalypse era we’ve grown up in, this age of chaos, where the world is always ending.”

This manifests through a gruesome metaphor of a body degrading from within as a happy, good-time guitar burbles on “Infection (Time Grows Thin),” a drift of images that pass like darkening clouds on “Become a Crow,” an elegy and a warning set to a complex musical accompaniment on “Fukushima” …

… and the title track, with vocals shouted one night against the thunder of helicopters circling just overhead, moments after police had shot an unarmed young black man steps away from the Hen house Studios in Venice Beach where they were recording.

“It was serendipitous and disturbing,” Nelson recalls. “We got these chills down our spines, like, ‘OK, I don’t know what this means but we’re gonna keep recording this song.’

Stir these alarming, sometimes darkly ironic tracks in with the bewitching instrumental “Matilda’s Galavant,” the rhythmically intricate yet eminently danceable “Ole Lukøje” and the rest of the album’s seven tracks and you have one of the most ambitious, distinctive and successful reflections of these challenging times.

“I hope TheyllKillYaa will make people feel something other than the fear and frustration a lot of us are feeling,” says bassist Jeff Smith.

“And,” Nelson adds, “I hope they’ll then start paying a little more attention to what’s happening to themselves and everyone else.”