Lucy London, "My Name Is Lucy (Original 12" Mix)" (2007)

It's not clear -- not immediately clear, or even ultimately clear -- that this track should be considered a "robots in love," or, to borrow the title of an EP by Future Bible Heroes, a "lonely robot" song. "My Name Is Lucy" is a sparse, minimal, even monotonous electronic track: a steady beat, slightly skittering, adorned only by a chiming three-note synthesizer riff and another more ominous, bassier synth line. Over this, we get a woman telling us about herself: her name is Lucy, she is 20 years old and from Chelsea, London, seemingly bisexual, and she dances to Pete Tong though she doesn't understand his music.

"My Name Is Lucy" might therefore be taking aim at a certain kind of clubby attitude. There are, for example, several jokes in the lyric. "I don't take Class A drugs," Lucy tells us. Beat. "Is cocaine Class A?" In this light, it would be kindred to electroclash tracks -- say, anything sung by Miss Kittin, or Pay TV's "Trendy Discotheque" -- that ape but supposedly also mock zombie club-goers. Or perhaps the track simply pokes fun at hipsterism, a genre that somehow seems especially popular with Myspace bands (see, for instance No Bra and their NSFW video for "Munchausen." Really).

But the longer "My Name Is Lucy" goes on, the more it morphs away from those kinds of songs, towards being a tale of a lonely girl robot. That's that automaton vocal and intonation, for one -- not so much vocoderized as it is spoken-and-spelt. And there is the rather unnerving confession of loneliness, even if it is broken up by a joke: "I'm on Myspace, Messenger, Skype, Facebook, Small World and Second Life [ah-ha!]/But nobody writes to me/Only some people write to enlarge my penis/I do not have a penis/I wish I did." And there is the repetition -- of these facts over and over, as if in desperation. And at the 4:30 mark: "I'm single." A long pause, so that the proclamation can sink in not as a come-hither invitation, but as yet another profession of solitude. Then, again: "My name is Lucy."