FM-2030

REVIEW: Reptaliens - FM-2030

Laura Kerry

The origin story of Reptaliens is also a love story. Cole and Bambi Browning met on the shoot of a music video in Portland, where the band is based. After six months of dating, they married “under a blanket of smoke from the season’s forest fires.”

Such a romantic start reflects in the music that they write as a duo and perform with the help of other Oregon musicians (Julian Kowalski, Bryson Hansen, and Tyler Vergian). On FM-2030, their full-length debut, the Brownings have created a breezy indie-pop collection filled with dreamy synths, jangly guitars, and catchy melodies. Bambi sings of love many times throughout the album, in lyrics such as “You know only I can see you girl” in “Nunya,” “Touch me / You can touch me” on “Dreaming,” and “Maybe I’ll fall in love” on “666Bus.” This is a starry-eyed sound.

Or so it seems.

In addition to love and marriage, Reptaliens draw from much stranger influences. As evidenced by an album named for a transhumanist philosopher, scattered references to Philip K. Dick novels, and their own name, the band has a thing for the weird, the paranormal, and the fringe. All of that emerges in subtle touches that lurk behind the sunny pop: flourishes of spacey synths and sound effects (“29 Palms,” “Butter Slime,” “Forced Entry”), psychedelic swirls of guitar (“Simulation”), and off-kilter, shifting time signatures (also “Simulation”). And while Bambi’s voice is pretty and sweet, it also sounds haunting, often seeming to be at a distance, detached or abstracted with effects. Many times, the instrumental voices overtake it.

And all of those loving lyrics mentioned above? They’re complicated. In “Nunya,” the subject imagines an unspoken relationship between him and the famous woman he stalks (“Come closer, baby / Look into my camera, girl”), a story told through increasingly creepy lyrics and the slow, sneaking march of the song. In “Dreaming,” the invitation to touch is for someone dreaming about her (when she “cannot say no”). In “666Bus,” the vision of falling in love is actually a vision of death: “Maybe I’ll get hit by a bus / While I was dreaming of falling in love / Or maybe I’ll fall in love / And die of a broken heart.”

Only in FM-2030 could you find a song about Satan and his demons wrapped up in plucky, West African-influenced arpeggios, shuffling percussion, a bouncy bassline, and a hook of a melody. And nowhere else could you find that next to a stalker song, a track called “Butter Slime,” a dreamy track about dreaming, and a song based on a story about psychic people living on the moon. Reptaliens is a match made in heaven—or rather, in outer space.