When listening to music, there are times when every song’s attempt to reach at the human experience seems like distant, insincere pap. Flash to Brainiac, which grabs precisely because of its lack of humanity. Unlike the soulless, droning inhumanity of techno, Brainiac’s music is reminiscent of the earliest Devo, which in turn is reminiscent of a foundling robot just learning to play music. Vocalist Timmy Taylor trades off between distorted shouting and falsetto wailing–even sharing duties with a Speak and Spell on occasion–when delivering his cross-eyed invectives, and the band quickly but jerkily follows through a musical flowchart of mega-distortion and oscilloscope sweeps. Brainiac does possibly the best job of categorizing itself with the song “I Am a Cracked Machine,” the gist of which is pretty much summed up in the title. Maybe it’s the apparent naivete which makes the music work so well, or maybe it’s the energy. Whatever it is, it fucks up everything you’ve come to expect from music and replaces it with a hunger for more unrefined fits of spastic robot energy.