Solid State

Jonathan Coulton's latest album, Solid State, is, like so many breakthrough albums, the product of a raging personal crisis one that is equally about making music and living online, getting older, and worrying about the apocalypse. A concept album about digital dystopia, it's Coulton's warped meditation on the ugly ways the internet has morphed since 2004. At the same time, it's a musical homage to his earliest Pink Floyd fanhood, a rock-opera about artificial intelligence. It's a worried album by a man hunting for a way to stay hopeful. Solid State narrates a trippy epic, a psychedelic, futuristic narrative about two men whose fates are linked over time (and who are both, as it happens, named Bob) and the God-like artificial intelligence that both protects and abandons them. It's a Neal Stephenson/Ray Kurzweil/Kevin Kelly-inflected fable that is located at the end of the world, much of it deep inside a city that has been sedated by what Coulton calls nicey-nice fascism locked-in, medicated, machine-run and which is ringed by a raw, ruined apocalyptic landscape.