Review Summary: Just a little whisper
Patrick Watson's fifth studio album is enticing, enthralling, and entirely enchanting. The album contains crescendos that are powerful yet delicate and softer melodies that are able to grab your attention and hold onto it. Love Songs for Robots is an indie album that cannot be ignored and is beautiful in almost every aspect.
As the album begins, any Patrick Watson fan can notice a slight change in the band's overall sound with the addition and more apparent focus on synths. As the title track builds, the synths layer into the soft guitar melody beautifully, making this slight change in sound welcoming. Watson's ability to truly utilize his dreamy, whispery voice as an instrument within itself really shines through on the opening track and on the album overall. The song builds and ends and what follows is the magnificent song "Good Morning Mr. Wolf". Musically, this is the most powerful song the band has ever made. Within the first 20 seconds the track explodes into a guitar riff bringing along the musical saw (yes I said saw), piano, and percussion with it. After only two tracks, the band has already changed it's sound quite drastically. Instead of just piano songs accompanied by interesting sounding percussion instruments, we get more of a lush, fuller sound from the band, adding on different instruments the band seems to experiment with. Will the excellence of the change hold up throughout the album? The answer is yes, but not without a few stumbles along its journey.
The next track "Bollywood" features a simple drum machine beat (another unusual change for this indie band) and yet again more synths. Upon listening to the first 30 seconds of this song, one might question exactly how this will work as the drum machine beat admittedly sounds a bit cheesy. However, Patrick Watson proves us wrong as the song develops into probably the most interesting song on the album. Halfway through the song it climaxes into an outburst of noise that will have your head bobbing throughout it all.
Impressive as "Bollywood" is, the following two tracks fail to impress. "Hearts" begins with a simple guitar and eventually builds into an upbeat, chaotic song. Unfortunately, the sound seems too cluttered and complex as the listener is unable to truly connect to it on a musical level. "Grace" is exactly opposite as "Hearts" as it starts off with a guitar strumming and becomes nothing more than that, unsuccessfully keeping the listener's attention throughout it.
When the piano riff of "In Circles" begins, Patrick Watson reminds his fanbase of his impressive ability to write amazing piano based songs. Although short in length, this track is a beautiful spiral into the all too familiar dark but yet dreamy sound Patrick has been famous for ("The Great Escape" comes to mind as an example).
Skipping a few tracks, the bands closes out the album with "Know That You Know" and "Places You Will Go". The former is a long, drawn out seven minute track that is simple yet captivating. The latter is the band's attempt at making a more accessible song and boy do they hit it out of the park. The song is still strange in the indie sense (note the synths and percussion choices), but the song is able to be slightly catchy and still build into an extremely amazing song.
Overall, Patrick Watson switches up his sound in a very interesting manner, but is able to do it in such a way that keeps his previous fanbase happy. It is a fantastic listen, apart from a couple boring songs here and there. It will take you on a dreamy and exquisite journey, one that you will not soon forget.
