Dave Hartley is bassist for The War on Drugs and many other Philly bands, but he still needs to fully flex his creative muscles. His solo project, Nightlands, has become a steady, ongoing concern. Nightlands' sophomore album, Oak Island, wanders well beyond the experiments of 2010's fascinating Forget the Mantra into a robotic pop music that sounds like Hartley took the ideas of vintage pop songwriters and threw them at a few MIT teaching assistants. "You're My Baby" is an ambient tone poem where vocoder-treated harmonies carry a simple hook and various synthetic sounds threaten for nearly three minutes before finally coalescing into an end piece. "Nico" turns up the bubbling textures until it's a wall of swirling synths and layered vocals wandering through the airbrushed countryside. "I Fell in Love with a Feeling" turns into what an early computer might have devised as both a love song and a dance track, with stilted rhythms and stiff, mechanized vocals. The entire record plays like a concept album about a computer that's fallen in love with humanity.