boice: Preset Emotions – Album Review

The New York podcaster, novelist and singer-songwriter says the ten-track affair was part-inspired by Jon Kabat-Zinn’s 2004 mindfulness classic, Wherever You Go, There You Are, and yet turns out to be a prescient comment on America’s political climate today.

Preset Emotions has been produced, composed, programmed, arranged and performed by boice using Ableton Live software and Arturia’s V Collection synthesizer software, delivering all sorts of resonances stretching from Tears for Fears and Talk Talk to Depeche Mode and Being Boiled-era Human League.

Kicking off the album is current single, Could’ve Been My Life, a mellifluous, brittle affair so finely poised and positioned as to be able to claim land rights of its own. The song is, no doubt, rooted in boice’s own family dysfunction, as boice is quick to point out when quizzed on the subject. ‘I’ve had this long-standing joke with a relative that my mother and father (who never lived together, and I’m estranged from) caused so much heartache in my life that they couldn’t possibly be my parents,’ he says. ‘So, I must have been switched at birth! And thus, the concept for this song was born!’

The esoteric Just A Tourist follows, another single, it focuses on boice’s sense of feeling like he doesn’t belong anywhere, whilst the exemplary Human League-tinged, Was I Wrong, is perhaps much more straightforward, and a song about thinking someone has mutual feelings for you and wondering if you had read the signs wrong – or maybe they were misleading you the whole time? The song segues seamlessly into I Love You Right Now which is all existential histrionics, yet surely the most celebratory song about embracing the present – ‘I love you right now/I don’t know about tomorrow’ – this side of a Depeche Mode convention.

Then there’s Fifth Cousin which is ruminative, funny even – ‘what the hell are distant cousins? What if a relative you never knew left you in their will!?’ – before the ‘completely fictional’, and ever-more wryly amusing, Friend of a Friend – ‘well, who hasn’t felt jealousy when your best friend gets another friend!?’ – plays the paranoia card to the max, boice singing to his friend that he thinks his new friend wants to kill him! Whatever the truth of these allegations, the song could well prove to be one of this year’s greatest earworms.

Elsewhere, Killing Two Burdens is (loosely) written from the perspective of Tom Ripley (the complicated antihero in Patricia Highsmith’s seminal, The Talented Mr Ripley) and about Ripley not fitting in – ‘I’ve been pinching my skin just to keep alive’ – and being torn between his dilemma of being a fake somebody or a real nobody. The sentiment surely harks back to boice’s own sense of unbelonging, whilst Valentine’s Day flips a coin and features boice as an unsympathetic protagonist – plot twist! – berating a lover for staying in a relationship where he treats them poorly.

Most intriguing of all, maybe, is Petty Complaints which is the album’s backbone, if not its coda: the title and the first few lines are from a letter Claude Debussy wrote, although this electronically inclined, jazz-infused number is really about being love-bombed by somebody and then dumped; first, you’re upset, but then you realize it was a good thing.

The album closes with the superbly evocative and optimistic, OK – a companion piece to Winners! the closing track on boice’s last record Nevermind The Hardships – a song about pursuing your dreams despite any setbacks.

Musically Preset Emotions, as you may have guessed from what I’ve said, is one of the most electronic albums you’ll have heard for a while, at times sounding like it was recorded in the early 1980’s and is refreshing in its rawness, but at its core it’s an undoubtably very personal record with the artist bearing all and wearing his heart on his sleeve.

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