| Sounds Like | "Devo goes metal." - Chumley
"This is smart, angry music, played as hard as possible by people who are mad as hell but also prone to the occasional fit of giggles." -Splendid e-zine
"Replicator put it all on the line, heaving up their guts in a cathartic rock-monster mishmash that's equal parts wall of sound and prog pomp - sans the guitar solos." -San Francisco Bay Guardian
It’s always a shaky proposition when nerds form rock bands: sometimes you get “Columbian Necktie,” and sometimes you get “Particle Man.” It’s just the luck of the draw. Fortunately for you, me, and Dupree, Replicator (from Oakland CA) seems to be of the former variety. Yes, they write songs about computers, time travel and nanotechnology, with over-the-top titles like “Delicious Fornicake,” “Assloads of Unrespect,” and “Login with my Fist,” but they also throw their goddamn weight into the aggro-chunk destructo-thing. Aggressive, self-aware vocals, lots of noise and feedback, with a hard and heavy rhythm section. The drummer’s an animal, and their bass sound had a nice rounded heft. “Devo via Fugazi!” I thought sensationally. They had a good sense of theatrics, knowing just when to thrash around and just when to drop everything and stare straight ahead in machine-like M. Mothersbaugh fashion, and guitar player Conan Neutron jumps on tables and tips over chairs and generally makes trouble. (I talked to him later and he enthused about Chrome, the Melvins, Black Sabbath, the Jesus Lizard, Bon-Scott era AC/DC and I nodded to the cosmic rhythm.)- Phoenix New Times
"With their off-kilter melodies and even more off-kilter lyrics ("It's like a surrealist painting / The kind with a giant penis serving tea to dainty old ladies" comes to mind), Oakland trio Replicator again illustrates troubled times in a technology-reliant age with Machines Will Always Let You Down. Their third full-length album - a trip to a time in which, among other horrors, life-altering nanotechnology allows microscopic machines to explode in the bloodstream - would be terrifying if not for the exuberance that constantly breaks through the surface. The jagged edges are plentiful, but they serve to create crazily built structures that inevitably come crashing down. Between declarations of "Damn right, there's evil inside" and "You will do as I command because I own you," Replicator has set themes of pessimism, corruption and oppressive fear against an appealingly chaotic sound. And for sheer magnitude of profanity, may I suggest "King Shit of Fuck Mountain" for the soundtrack to the film adaptation of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City?- Skinny Mag
""Hey, everybody, we're all gonna get laid!" Rodney Dangerfield's character, Al Czervik, says in one of the classic lines from Caddyshack. Oakland's Replicator sample the line as the tag end of "Delicious Fornicake," the opening track of their new album, Machines Will Always Let You Down (Radio Is Down). The inclusion is telling: Caddyshack celebrates the redemption — nay, triumph — of the little guy, the lowly, the nobody, the nerd, the caddy, for chrissakes, despite the oppression of greedy, classist boors. Machines is, in its way, a tight, terse, aggro, nerd-rock opera, with tweed cubicles replacing expansive set pieces, and hard, noisy post-punk reminiscent of geek-rock kingpins Big Black, in an alternate universe where Steve Albini doesn't take himself so seriously. "It's kind of, for lack of a better term, big rock," vocalist-guitarist Conan Neutron says over the phone from his apartment. In the opening track, the narrator, with the help of "a few beers, some Scotch, and a pack of cigarettes," builds "a robot with which to have sex." In "Payment www.yzzz.rd" (pronounced "wizard"), Neutron, an IT guy for a "major financial institution" when not living the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, sings, "I just got paid / So come get my cash / Come take my money / Come get it fast," the refrain of wage slaves everywhere.
The next track, "Assloads of Unrespect," is in the voice of a degenerate dot-com millionaire, the kind who crawled the Bay Area like a new species of roach in the mid- to late '90s: "Let me begin / By saying I'm rich / I'm well-dressed / Good-looking / Hey — ain't that a bitch? / Because I own you / That's right, I own you." In an example of Neutron's biting, often hilarious lyrics, the boss we love to hate goes on: "I heard it said the meek shall inherit the earth /Well, just make damn sure to shine my shoes first." The album goes on to tackle such subjects as time travel, the Enigma machine, and the spy-versus-spy uses of nanotechnology, before ending with the Office Space–like "Login with My Fist" — the battle cry of cubicle commandos everywhere — which winds down in a cacophony of screams and guitar squall, an implacable Commodore VIC-20–style voice repeating, "It does not compute," in the background.
It's worth noting that the disc isn't a celebration of all things techie, often a nerd stereotype. Rather, it's a scathing denunciation of technology, or, more accurately, the devious and inhumane uses that technology has been put to in the hands of the powerful and ethically impaired. When the nerd class stops letting itself be pimped out for the glory of so-called pure science, then maybe it'll inherit the earth. And when people stop being enamored of machines making life easier, maybe they'll realize they're being enslaved by technology — that, indeed, machines will always let you down.
"We make music for very pissed-off smart people," Neutron says. He goes on to acknowledge that this target demo is a small slice of the music-listening public: "Our music isn't very popular." Formed in 1999, Replicator — Neutron, Ben Adrian on bass and keyboard, Chris Bolig on drums, and "junior partner" Todd Grant on guitar — have seen trends come and go. "First everyone was really into indie pop," Neutron says. "Then everyone was into sounding like Radiohead and then garage rock and then everyone wanted to, like, wear a mask and not really play music."
Through it all, Replicator have released three pissed-off, smart records, toured heavily, and brought to mind a time "when it was not an insult to be considered brilliant," as the lyric on "Login with My Fist" goes. I'm not saying they're brilliant — nor am I saying they're not — but what they're attempting doesn't accept mediocrity. This uncompromising approach often seems to have relegated them to the middle slot of shows while the underground flavor du jour headlines above them. Like Dangerfield, they get no respect.
One of the titles kicked around for the new album was Fuck You, Still Here. "I see bands that are more careerist," Neutron says. "They have this idea: 'Oh, we're going to get signed and then we're going to make this video and go on tour with this band.' That seems to be their end goal.
"Our end goal is to return the ass-kicking that music has given us." -San Francisco Bay Guardian, Wednesday June 20, 2007
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