consider myself at least a little unique in that my first listen of Juan Maclean’s Less Than Human was a vestal one; I cared little about his involvement with Six Finger Satellite—much less the band itself—or his backing by the Dance-Punk Pantheon of DFA. The irony was almost crushing as practically every examination of said album was prefaced on multi-contextual experiences outside the music itself. Hey, at the time I lived in Hamilton, Ohio and there most people’s experience with CBGB was the logo t-shirt at Hot Topic. What mattered was that the album was good not because I knew Mr. Maclean was in the DFA clique nor because I knew of his travails leading up to the release, but because it was simply good. It wasn’t until recently that I realized what makes Maclean’s effort pretty good.

Stratosphere Control isn’t a weak replica of Less Than Human by virtue of temporal precedence—I seriously doubt no one thought of divorcing Dance-Punk into its constituent parts before either artist—but because it wallows in static synth crunches and gimmicky downbeats well after their expiration dates. For the most part the songs should have either been truncated or given even infinitesimal variations in order to sustain my attention, because they don’t so much mutate as revert to a specific refrain and pretty much go apeshit with it.

There’s a common trajectory to most of the songs, one that begins with an admittedly attractive loop. Opener “Pik Nik” emerges with layered synths and Casio beats which, quite frankly, is pretty much how the rest of the album progresses, with new elements being thrown in as counterpoints and/or complements. But about halfway through you see through the static charade, the cloud of keyboard wank and sludge, and finally stop the songs when their trajectories begin to take on a downward slope. The essential problem that bedevils the second half of every song is that they so manifestly lose steam that you cannot help but become cognizant of the lackluster performance. Compare this to Maclean’s effort, which provided distinct songs built on tension and variation, and Stratosphere Control turns from simply mundane to empty exercise.

Another absent element that makes this a purely middling effort is the lack of narrative. This isn’t to say the project was damned a priori, but rather the fact that it’s more difficult to create a compelling work when it’s based on music with no clear emotional ambit. And boy, Stratosphere Control feels like it essays to be weird for the sake of it, but only ends up offering you a buffet of ambiguous “WTF?” Song titles like “Picking Up Girls at The Miami Planetarium” and “The Dinosaurs Must Have Done Something Wrong” possess semantic vacuity and end up being red herrings for thin musical content. It’s not that Maclean’s content offered overwhelming profundity—didn’t some of it regard, umm, gay robots?—but the narrative flow nonetheless provided a sense of pace and pathways.

In toto the album fails because it articulates at a single speed, in a single direction, and with a single-mindedness. Whenever a possibly aberrant pattern emerges from the tessellation like the treated horns on “Picking Up Girls at The Miami Planetarium” or the piano at the conclusion of “The Dinosaurs Must Have Done Something Wrong,” it’s quickly overwhelmed by and absorbed into the pedestrian rest as though it was merely a temporary act of parthenogenesis. If anything, Less Than Human affirms the belief that a good album always says something, no matter how insignificant, because then it becomes at least something upon which we can fix our attention. Stratosphere Control is merely a glaring empty set or circumlocution set to drum machines and distortion.