Pop was promised to deliver the pleasures of pop; nothing less or more. What does a pop utopianism look like? Utopia is no-place; utopianism is concerned with the invisible potentials that sleep in the interstices of our world. Fenster's Lucas Ufo, who records as World Brain, is preoccupied with the ethers that surrounds us -- he lists among his inspirations for Peer 2 Peer, sitting at the windows and "watching WiFi enter the room". As the album's title suggests, this pop utopianism is often concerned with the romantic potentials of digital technology, and its central image, the network -- while the music often invokes the studios of the 1980s, the themes are more suggestive of the web-positivity of the '90s and early '00s. "Network" is a three-minute guitar solo impersonating those WiFi signals. "Hyptertext" call the links that weave our experience of the internet one of "the true modern things". "<3beat" imagines two computers falling in love, discussing the things that matter to them. Opener "The Pangean Anthem", by its name (after the no-place that was every-place of the first supercontinent) and infectious cheer, is a wordless declaration of intent for what follows. Lead single "Made U Cry", which made a splash in early 2018, is addressed to Satan, the original utopian, possessed of the prettiest smile. "Everybody Dies" featuring ?bercrooner and frequent Mansions And Millions guest Sean Nicholas Savage, is a kind of thanato-utopianism, a blissful, mellow meditation on the grand egalitarianism of mortality. "It's All True", driven by a maddeningly infectious riff emphasized with a Windows 95 system "ding", simply lists well-known and common phenomena, lost in wondrous awe at the simple fact of existence. In a similar mood, "Bubble Tea" asks "isn't it sweet to live on this sphere, isn't it wonderful?" Even the album's most melancholy moment, "Besides", takes a cosmic perspective, dwelling on the parallels between the proverbial grain of sand and the grains in a lonesome bowl of rice, meditating on the holographic quality of mood. Both sweet and silly, wistful and whimsical, Peer 2 Peer is always affirmative. Where others might mine the past as a cheap source of irony or nostalgia, World Brain has a made a clearing equidistant between then and now, a no-place in which to build a pop utopia in miniature. Includes printed inner sleeve; Includes download code.
