Chocolate and Moet for everyone! This stands as the 200th review I've written for Pitchfork. Confetti flutters! Shh. Get down behind the couch. Turn off the lights. Lets surprise the record! Here it comes. I can hear it pitter pattering down the hallway! Oh, that's just processed snare brushes. There goes the doorbell! Get ready! Oh, thats just the soft chimes tolling in the background above the processed snare brushes. That squishing noise could only be matter transporter teleporting the 200th album to the doorstep! Oh, we don't have a matter transporter. This isn't the future. That's just synth squirts. Wait, the record's been playing this whole time! I didn't even notice! Well, um, surprise, National Skyline!

When I first started writing for Pitchfork I created a fantastic, conceited alter ego (no, really) who would travel the world in a satin jacket, receiving massages, reviewing records. 30 months later (for those keeping track, that's 6.66 a month! Read into that what you will.) I'm sitting in a modern Brussels airport waiting for a flight transfer to go see Radiohead. What dreams may come! Fittingly, I'm listening to National Skyline's EP, which is music specifically tailored for waiting around to see Radiohead in modern European airports. National Skyline want to sound a bit like Radiohead. The band's name could either be an airline or a silhouette of architecture. Their artwork has the cold, florescent photographs of tile and escalators bands of this sort feel necessary to wrap their sterile, spacious pop music. National Skyline's Jeff Garber, formerly of the "Champaign sound" (or for more discriminate tastes: "that Shiner emo-grunge sound") band Castor, fills his magazine racks with Ikea catalogs, Wallpaper, Flaunt, and Artbyte. It sounds like he gets off on Frank Gehry and Gap commercials.

It's rather disappointing that bands continue to operate under the impression that the future will sound empty, clean, silver plated, and designed by Scandavians. In thirty years this design and sound will seem as silly as "Forbidden Planet." And so it's hard to reconcile Garber's soft emotional sighs with the bleached synth-pop. In trying to sound futuristic, National Skyline come off like an 80's band. "Air" (yeah, exactly) brings to mind a silly boy with Wolverines hair and his sister's blouse swaying behind a Korg. Ew, he's wearing mascara! National Skyline bring strobes and smoke on stage with them. Really. Haven't we gone over this before? Perhaps they should be forced to listen to Human League's Travelogue ten times before going down this road again. Just as the Cure break up, mopey shimmering 80's pop comes back! Go figure.

Yet, National Skyline pull it off. Perfectly. Perhaps too perfectly, but its pleasant, when not vapid. Bands like Antarctica reach for the same brass ring (or is that just the Ösund towel holder?) of cosmopolitan goth blips. Fortunately, National Skyline didn't release a double album. Airports and lobbies may look wonderful in photograph, but who wants to live there? The Conde Nast cafeteria in New York sweeps you away to future landscapes, but you're just there to eat pudding. And so thats what we're left with on National Skyline's slick EP-- modern urban design sweeping epically over glass cups of pudding.

-Brent DiCrescenzo