Recently Last Year’s Model evolved past us puny mortals and decided to have a party showing off their shiny new carapaces for a night of friends, family and what they called Human 2.0.

I saw Last Year’s Model for the first time a few months ago, when they opened for Hadouken and they really impressed me with their blend of spazzy synthpunk and sci-fi aesthetic driven to extremes not really seen since the 80s. Producing a music that is at once unique but also familiar; hyperactive hyperspace for Hypekids raised on 80s cartoons, 90s sci-fi and High Fructose Corn Syrup;onster mechanicalodies at a million miles an hour. The kind of music that would play in movies filmed in the late 80s but set in the post apocalyptic future.

Deckpunk? Geekcore? Whatever bullshit genre name you make up to describe the music, it’s great stuff. It’s music with Blast Processing activated, appropriating 8-Bit samples but not slavishly worshiping at the Bleep Bloop altar.

With a new EP ready to go we headed out to see how the new songs sounded live.

The Tank is an amazing venue. I say that both unironically and enthusiastically. Set in a dilapidated space with actual seating, it’s what you would expect a DIY underground theater to be like, staging Retro Neo-Futurist works where everyone on stage says one word and pantomimes out the Iran Contra trials dressed as luchadores.

There’s a lobby / ticket booth / concession stand which is about the size of my job’s conference room, where you walk in and are directed to your event. Last Year’s Model was on the main stage and I didn’t even know about the upstairs area until it was too late to really go exploring.

The main stage is on the small side, cozy in Realtor terms, with both seating and an open area with a fairly deep stage and an ample supply of lights. The PA system looked bussed in rather than actually installed and there was an old fashioned crow’s nest style technician’s booth that was accessible through a rickety metal ladder that caused a sensation of fear as I was convinced someone was going to fall to their deaths. If you were a theater nerd in school, it would either be comfortingly nostalgic or horrifyingly inadequate, depending on your zip code growing up. To me, it struck me as a place where Federal Theater Project sponsored shows would have been performed to a crowd full of smoking intellectuals. The reality is probably far more boring, but ahhh, the romance of theater.

The basement was incredible. You wandered down a long hallway to the bathroom, where one of the urinals had a three-inch long cockroach drowned in the urinal. The women’s room, I hear was as exciting, but bug free.

Opening the night was two-piece act Little, Big, a bassist and vocalist with prearranged backing tracks. Bassist Chuck Meyer played like he was a one-man project to reclaim bass lines from keyboardists. He approached the melodies like a keyboardist, playing complex note sequences that required a lot of digital agility aided with looping effect pedals. He was like the postsynth equivalent to Bruce Willen’s “posthardcore” take on the instrument. The vocals by Dana Young weren’t great, but I couldn’t tell if that was because of the singer or the equipment. I’m tempted to give her a pass because every band had a whole host of issues with their performance thanks to the venue’s equipment. The backing track was a click of drums, the vocals were a long series of tones rather than lyrics. The only thing that was clear was the bass.

They had a CD of music from a previous project; in talking to Chuck afterwards the only real difference between the two is that the older project used a live drummer. I’d like to see them again with better equipment before I make any kind of final judgment one way or another, but it was at least interesting to watch.

The second band, Blush Response played late 80s Industrial music the way god intended. Full of art and artifice shot through with attitude and anger, but unfortunately the venue was against them totally. They lost monitors, instruments levels would suddenly blow out, microphones would cease working, tracks would vanish from the sound mix, the mixing would just get skewed and we’d lose half the instruments, unintentional feedback would tear through the soundscape. It was just a nightmarish mess and I couldn’t help but feel really quite sorry for the performers.

Which is a shame; when things were going well, it was very good industrial in a way that doesn’t really get produced much from what I can tell. It’s all epic trance with growling voices as though Cannibal Corpse were given pure MDMA during the songwriting process. One piece of advice, the vocalist’s singing wasn’t strong nor tonally in sync with the music. I would suggest a bit of processing on it to either mask this slightly or to go full on reverbotron and hide it in the mix aiming for tone and mood.

Last Year’s Model took to the stage and took great pains to sound check everything and they were rewarded for this diligence by having the least amount of things go wrong. I think the only thing I really noticed was when they said the monitors went out but they did not lose time in the song. Everything was extremely precise, even when taken to extremes as in their song “2012” which is made up of stops, starts and stings.

Last Year’s Model stretched out their setlist so that no one stretch was dominated by the new material off of Human 2.0. They brought tracks from the Vapid EP, New Wave of Attack Mode Robot Pop and Human 2.0 while updating arrangements to each. Ceremony sounded much fuller live than it did on Vapid.

Everything about Last Year’s Model is great live. They threw themselves into the Hadouken performance and that energy and technical precision was topped by the performace they gave for this. Guitars, drums, keyboard and vocals were all in perfect time with one another, as though the performers were MIDI synced.

If you’re tired of synthpop meaning boring musicians vomiting substandard pop and producing melodies that could sterilize a frog at 100 yards, then you should dance under a sky the color of a television turned to a dead channel. You should dance to a night of Last Year’s Model.