SOPHIE: PRODUCT

When music from the project SOPHIE first emerged in 2013, it sounded state-of-the-art. It was the work of a producer who had rarely been photographed and who never gave interviews, which  seemed appropriate if also tiresome. Such mystery had long become a cliché by this point, but uncertain authorship suited these bulbous, sparkly audio objects, which seemed to float down out of the sky like a cluster of neon-colored balloons ready to pop. “Bipp” and “Elle”—the former impossibly buoyant with an earworm vocal line, the latter featuring deep bass and chasms of space, a bright and twinkly counterpoint to the grim tone common to dubstep— promised that future music was going to be weirder and more disorienting than we imagined but that it would also function as a bent version of popular song.

Two years and several singles later, SOPHIE—long known to be the work of London-based producer Samuel Long—is now understood mostly in the context of P.C. Music, a loose UK collective centered on producer A.G. Cook that recasts brazen commercialism as a kind of winking postmodern art project. PRODUCT, which collects the SOPHIE singles to date and adds some new songs, was released in limited-edition versions that packaged it with a jacket, sunglasses, and platform shoes, as well as a version sold with an object that looked like a sex toy. When you take into account that bounty of merch, and add the fact that SOPHIE’s “Lemonade” has in the last year been used to soundtrack a McDonald’s commercial, of all things, it’s clear that the act of buying and selling is deeply embedded within this project.

You might look at all this as a Warholian transformation of commerce into art or you might just see a run-of-the-mill cash-in, but neither of these perspectives adds much to the enduring brilliance of SOPHIE’s first pair of singles. Following on “Bipp” and “Elle”, “Lemonade” intensifies the sound, like switching from a freshly squeezed glass of the titular drink to drinking Minute Maid concentrate right out of the cardboard can. Befitting music constructed at least in part as a critique of consumerism, SOPHIE’s tracks are gleaming and immaculate on the surface and hollow to the core beneath it. “Hard”’s chiming synths and rippling bass are again set against wide spaces of unnerving silence, a void where a deeper sense of meaning might be.

These tracks argue, often convincingly, that the surface is everything. It’s Turing Test pop: if its exterior catches your ear and makes you feel things, that communication is proof enough that some kind of soul resides inside the machine. The closing track here, “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye”, shows this contrast in widescreen. It’s a melodic construction worthy of Max Martin, but the pitched-up voice, drum-free production, and generally half-finished feel highlight all the immediate pleasures of pop music while completely erasing the idea of a point of view. It’s so “almost there” you can’t help but play it over and over.

But SOPHIE is not, alas, an album-length proposition. Even at 26 minutes, the record drags, and the three song stretch of “MSMSMSM”, “VYZEE”, and “L.O.V.E.”—that’s 38 cents of your album dollar—is depressingly skippable. These tracks either recycle bits from the earlier singles (chirpy vocals, squeaky percussion) or fold in new elements that sound mundane (trap percussion, doomy synths), leading to tracks that sound like they could have come from anybody. That these are the newer songs doesn’t help matters or bode particularly well for what might come next. And then there’s the fact that music this compressed and this syrupy is best heard in small doses, before your ear gets tired listening to it.

So the main problem with PRODUCT, ironically enough, is one of format. Every industrialist wanting to get his or her goods to the world knows that you have to package them properly. Heard as individually and spaced many months apart, the best tracks here were diamond-hard realizations of very specific sonic ideas; placed on an album alongside songs that use similar ingredients but are markedly inferior, they rattle around in the can, perfect objects in search of the right container.