The Fading Facade Of A White Collar Dream

Automatic “Skyscraper”

There’s a line from Richard Linklater’s Slacker derived from Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies that was made more famous by R.E.M. when Michael Stipe worked it into the hit “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”: “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.” That feels very relevant to Automatic, particularly in this song in which Izzy Glaudini’s deadpan vocal and cold observation of the wealthy sounds like she’s withdrawing in disgust in real time. The focus in “Skyscraper” is on the way the extremely wealthy put a distance between themselves and the underclasses as an escape from reality, but it’s a precarious situation – if things go wrong, it’s a much steeper fall. Glaudini zeroes in on this fear of failure and the way it becomes a prison that can spoil the aspiration to ascend above the rest. In the climax of the song, the one part of the song that’s a little more harmonically rich than the stark skeletal sound of the rest of the track, she perks up the melody just to reach a bleak conclusion: “You’re lost in the fog, your skin fits so tight now you can’t move it all.”

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