VICTORIA MARTINEZ
Arts Writer

The first minute of Hello Earth by Girl + the Machine is really, really good.

A single high note transforms into handclaps and subtly layered synth. A driving beat appears and an ’80s style male voice. Then a plaintive pop female voice breaks in demanding sunshine. After that, though, the album pretty much disintegrates.

That first track “we take the train” (no capitals being a sure-fire sign that this is music as art) manages to hold steady to a repetitive pleasantry, but Girl’s voice slowly starts to grate with its high pitch.

“inside outside” has a nice little horn section four minutes into its four minute and 30 second exercise in navel gazing, to its credit.

Girl (Jackie Liew offstage) and her band sound like one of Gwen Stefani’s backup girls Love, Angel, Music or Baby making a lounge album. If Love, Angel, Music or Baby was in fact a talentless art school kid who really, really liked Bjork.

That said, they describe their music as a “diverse interfusion of styles (that) appropriately serves the movements of collective conscience and progressive thought for which GTM is an artistic vehicle.” So, there’s that.

This doesn’t sound experimental. One track features a glorious cacophonous crashing that under the production of, say, Animal Collective, would be surprisingly melodic and capture the imagination; this, oddly, only blends into the otherwise ambient tune.

The best two tracks are “eyes on u (la la)” and “eyes on u (electro),” which are the same song but different.

The “la la” version has all kinds of languages and lots of la-la-ing. Girl doesn’t sound screechy and the band sounds relaxed but less like the bad elevator music than they normally do. It is a pleasant three minutes.

“Electro Eyes on U” brings out the Harajuko girl vibe with an upbeat and adorable spin on the first version. Like Gwen Stefani with No Doubt, it actually sounds both catchy and compelling. A horn section and some playful whistling close out the end with an almost ska vibe.

After that comes “chill,” which is forgettable but not unpleasant. In a fancy lounge, it would in fact be perfect music to play softly. Otherwise, useless.

Flipping through a track that blurred into a another track — maybe “honeyjump” or “mermaid,” though which is entirely uncertain — I determined that the track was in fact the same sound for however God-awful long it lasted. Every 10 seconds or so of the song that passed, I would remove my finger from the fast forward button and hear the same noise. Even that took too long and eventually I gave up on the track.

A couple more tracks start out promising, but quickly bore the listener into actually thinking there is no song playing at all. This actually happened to my brother.

Apparently the stage show is full of avant-garde symbolism and weirdness, as Girl + the Machine perform some sort of space alien theatre. Maybe that would be worthwhile, but judging from YouTube, not so much.

Unless you’re planning a snooty cocktail party with a need for some light music to back conversations about how creative and misunderstood every one of the guests is, skip this.