Machine Translations “Happy”

When my wife and I were in Melbourne last year as part of our honeymoon, we made a point of looking for a good independent CD shop that might recommend some great local fare. As luck would have it, we found what we were looking for in the Fitzroy neighbourhood where many of Australia’s bands live.

Polyester Records (map, in case you’re ever in the neighbourhood) has a fantastic selection of local and national, independent and commercial acts. I explained that I like good indie pop and rock, but I fall in love with albums that require a lot of listens before appreciating, and the kindly gentleman behind the counter offered up quite a few recommendations. And all for acts I wouldn’t otherwise have known about in Los Angeles. I bought 3 of the recommended CDs: New Buffalo‘s The Last Beautiful Day, Mountains in the Sky‘s Celestial Son, and, my favorite of the three, Machine Translations‘s 2002 album Happy.

Happy apparently topped all of the Polyester staff’s best-of lists in 2002. I’ve been listening to this album pretty regularly since I bought it. It definitely takes a bunch of listens to appreciate the whole thing, but there are at least three readily accessible tracks: Amnesia, for which the animated video below was made; She Wears a Mask, which was a radio hit in Australia; and The Monkey’s Back. The rest of the album, really the whole album, sounds rather strange. Those three tracks listed just happen to be poppy enough that they stick out at first. But the entirety of the album comes across as the ravings of a mad man. Sure, he’s friendly, but he still crazy. Many of the songs include secondary voice tracks that are either robotic, backwards, or made up of spliced-together words. Sometimes these are the primary voice tracks. All in all, though, these are the ramblings of a benevolent pyscho (remember the album’s title). After enough listens, Happy sounds more like succor when you’re on the verge of a freak-out.

The lyrics are clever and weirdly satisfying. Two of the songs include strange lines about cheese: that’s the cheese you ate before and roll out the plastic cheese. But my favorite line is in the first song Acres: There’s seven kinds of seafood/but you ate my self-control.

Happy is a mostly calm album with three fun pop songs churned into a taffy of crazy robots and women, and topped off with plenty of cheese. It’s worth paying the import fees to pick it up from Amazon, but you can also download the album from iTunes (see below).

• Listen to She Wears a Mask.

Watch the video for Amnesia.

Buy Machine Translations’ Happy from .
Buy Machine Translations’ Happy [Import] from Amazon.

Buy New Buffalo’s The Last Beautiful Day from Amazon.
Buy New Buffalo’s The Last Beautiful Day from .