Posts Tagged ‘laptop’

Watch: ‘Confused’ by Laptop

Posted: 27 January 2026 in Singles and EPs, Recommended Streams and Videos
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Laptop’s new protest anthem ‘Confused’ explores a fractured America: the disco at the end of the world.

‘Confused’ is the emotional and ideological center of On This Planet and the most definitive song Laptop has ever released. Written in the immediate psychological aftermath of January 6, the track does not recount events so much as diagnose the mental fallout of living inside them. Certainty masquerades as truth, spectacle replaces substance, and fear is recycled as identity. The song captures the disorientation of watching democratic reality fracture in real time, filtered through the eyes of someone glued to the news and overwhelmed by noise. Rather than offering answers, “Confused” leans into the unease. Lyrics like “They claim that they’re abused” and “Not quite the Reichstag fire” anchor the song firmly in the present, while the recurring chant of “The Con” functions less as a slogan than a warning. There is a dry, unsettling irony threaded throughout, a recognition that when everyone sounds convinced, certainty itself becomes the least reliable narrator.

Musically, ‘Confused” is Laptop at their most hypnotic and rhythm-driven. Built on a circular, Afro-influenced groove recalling Fela Kuti’s forward momentum filtered ‘through the nervous minimalism of Talking Heads’ Remain in Light era, the song accumulates tension instead of releasing it. Recorded initially in Valencia and expanded in Nevis, a place the band came to call the inspiration island, the contrast between physical calm and distant chaos sharpens the song’s disquiet. Escape, the song suggests, may be part of the problem. The accompanying video pushes these themes into visual satire. Framed as a CNN-style broadcast, Charlie Hartman appears as an unnervingly composed news anchor delivering chaos with media normalcy, while fragmented correspondents report from vaguely defined locations. Jesse Hartman looms as an ambiguous figure, part tyrant, part media creation, part projection, never fully explained. The result is less parody than mirror, a world where information, performance, and power blur until belief itself feels optional.

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Formed in the late ’90s, Laptop released three albums with Island Records with praise from the NME, The Guardian and others for their stylized blend of synth-pop & irony. Now a multi-generational project with Jesse Hartman joined by his son Charlie Hartman, they are not observing the present from a distance. ‘Confused’ is the sound of living inside it — aware of history, aware of danger, and quietly aware that even the people telling us what’s happening may not know what to believe themselves. Yet for all its tension, ‘Confused’ is not humorless. Like much of Laptop’s work, the song is threaded with a dry, unsettling irony — the kind that emerges when reality itself starts to feel absurd.

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Laptop

Gintas K – Jingles With Bells

Posted: 14 November 2022 in Albums
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Birdfriend – 2nd September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Gintas K is at it again! Last year I was compelled to break my vow not to listen to, or write a word about any Christmas-themed releases on account of his album, Christmas Till the End, released on December 25th, and now, just when I’m getting into full foaming at the mouth mode over how there’s Christmas stuff everywhere since the week before Halloween, I discover he dropped an album bearing a title with overly festive connotations, which was, in fact, released at the start of September – and which was recorded in July!

Jingles With Bells was, like a number of other works, recorded live, using computer, midi keyboard, and controller.

Despite the album title being in English, and offering something of a play on words with jingles suggesting advertisements as well as festive chimes, the track titles are in K’s native Lithianian, and I’m not entirely sure I trust Google translate when it tells me that ‘irgi dugnai auksti ir aopacia garsai gerai visai’ is ‘the bottoms are also high and the background sounds are quite good’ – although it is a fair description of the six-and-a-half-minute opener. It begins with sparse drips and drops echoing as if in a giant cave, before Kraptavičius introduces his trademark flickering electrostatic glitches and whirs. The layers build as crunches and crackles clamour into a frenzy of fucked-up robotics.

Stammering, fractured beats collide and disperse in all directions, a wheezing, groaning, creaking array of electronic simulations and rapidfire thumps like hammers and nail guns, jazz percussion and despite the complete absence of any actual percussion, Jingles With Bells is marked by a complete absence of any actual beats, instead being driven by clattering short sounds that resemble beats and even trick the ear and mind with their (ar)rhythmic explosions. The last thirty seconds of the seven-minute ‘is to pacio tesinys geras’ (which may or may not translate as therefore the continuation is good’ is marked by silence, and it’s a welcome reprieve from the blindingly busy blitzkrieg blast.

‘istisinis is to pacio’ is a snarling drilling grind of bass, but also introduces the first jangling treble that might pass at a distance as a jingle, but it more resembles a dentist’s drill than sleigh, and the whole experience is less jingle and more nerve-jangling and uncomfortable.

Echoic droplets and sounds reminiscent of jangling jamjars trickle through the album, and the ten-minute monster that is ‘varpeliai noiz bugn bosas neblogai’ (‘bells noiz bugn boss not bad’ – yeah… nah) begins with what sounds like a bath being run down the plug and a crackling blast of blocks of distortion against – finally – chimes. But against a creaking croaking, cracking low end like the bow of a wooden ship breaking against rocks in a storm, those melodic tinkles soon build to forge an oppressive, head-compressing sonic torture; it’s simply all too much. But too much is never enough, and as such, it all adds up to another album that bears all of Gintas K’s quite unique hallmarks forged from some mangled laptop machinations, manipulated in real time.

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