I don't have a lot of use for PC Music. The shadowy UK collective, which has built an aesthetic on bright plastic pop-music collisions, is interesting, at least theoretically, but that's its problem, too. The music strains for interesting. It piles chirpy vocal samples on top of jittery, hopped-up synth sounds, cranking every strain of futuristic circa-now pop music -- J-pop, K-pop, Max Martin melodic math, knowingly silly Euro-club -- into a dizzy now-sounds pileup, smashing you with happy-face emojis so relentlessly that you know that what you're hearing is parody. QT, the crew's figurehead, is presented as being the human embodiment of a new energy drink that you can't buy. So this is music as theoretical image-projection. It uses the sounds of music that we've come to accept as "fun," and it's cranked them up so hard that it becomes music about fun rather than actual fun music. In the process of making a high-art statement out of everything, they've robbed actual pop music of the joy and intensity and inventiveness and melodic rigor that, when it's working right, makes pop music so great. (Nevermind that the UK producers of the early-'90s happy hardcore scene nailed this sound better and did it from a sincere place.)