Records: Aphex Twin's Come to Daddy

By Peter Jaros

"Psychological" and "Electronic" are not words which immediately leap together. Synthesized and sampled music with a regular, pounding beat usually abjures human images; it calls up, perhaps, a mental picture of a little boy hiding behind a stack of big, expensive machines.

Come To Daddy is a trip through the machine back into the boy. This isn't surprising for the man whose last U.S. album was called "The Richard D. James Album," after himself, and whose cover featured his grinning mug. On Come To Daddy's cover, the grinning mug is plastered onto the faces of a host of schoolchildren. Accordingly, this time around, James seduces us into childhood, a childhood sealed inside his head.

We're forced in with the first of three versions of the title track (never mind that, in prime Aphex Twin fashion, none of the "mixes" of "Come To Daddy" share so much as tempo or thematic material), which sounds, at first listen, like a Nine Inch Nails knockoff with classy samples. The distorted voice screaming, "I want your soul . . . I will eat your soul . . . Come to daddy!" may strike the jaded as satiric and overblown, but it scares the bejeezus out of the inner child. The cryptic lyrics hint at child abuse, a recurring motif that destroys the listener's defenses.

The immediate, diametric contrast of "Flim" sucks the listener into a wide-eyed, oversmooth, and safe interior landscape--it's almost a lullaby for a baby robot, coolly comforting after the violence of the first number. It is tempting to get caught solipsistically oscillating inside and just stay there, the CD on repeat forever (or at least until the medium reaches obsolescence).

This hypnosis is punctuated by the electroshock of percussive rushes and downright painful samples, not to mention enough hidden details to keep the record fresh on repeated listenings. James keeps it catchy while always throwing something into each track that you just can't dance to. As if the altered, childlike voices (like an exhortation to "Stop making that big face!") weren't enough to make you shudder.

I'm more than happy not to know anything about Richard D. James' family life. Pity, though, that Freud never got a listen. (Warp Records)

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