Mystery Music March

Me To Be – I Am The World Trade Center

Like most people I first heard about I Am The World Trade Center in the days after September 11th as the press rushed to find a fresh angle on those terrible events. Given their name, it was inevitable that this group would be implicated, although many journalists rather got the wrong end of the stick, accusing them of cashing in on the tragedy, even though they’d taking their name from the buildings in 1999. The band announced that for the rest of their current tour they’d be poignantly calling themselves ‘I Am The World ….’, and the journos flocked elsewhere.

A bit unfortunate then because their album, Out of the Loop is a fairly incontroversial bit of synth-pop of which May To Be is a fairly typical example. “How can you” ethereally ponders singer Amy Dykes, “Tell me what you want to me to be / When I don’t think / You are the one for me?” over a static drum beat, harpsichord sample pretending to play the opening few bars of Enola Gay and something which sounds like an over-pitched flute. It’s bouncy and upbeat and wouldn’t have been too out of place as the backing music for a Commodore 64 game, perhaps a sequel to The Last Ninja, aspiring to be the kind of dance beats people might be listening to in the future, the musical equivalent of a Douglas Trumbull concept painting.