Review
Genre and Mood
Mount Sims brought cool detachment to electroclash, and Together Alone distils it. It is electro and synth-pop seen through a cold, nocturnal lens, hypnotic and provocative, with a melancholic streak running under the gloss.
Song Summary
The title says it all: the song is about closeness that does not quite connect, bodies in the same room and minds somewhere else. Mount Sims sets it over a sparse, metronomic machine beat and chilly synths, with a vocal delivered in a flat, half-whispered croon that makes the intimacy feel clinical. The memorable quality is that emotional distance, which turns a song about loneliness into something oddly seductive: glamorous on the surface, and lonely the moment you look closer.
Musical Breakdown
The track is minimal and repetitive by design, its power in the loop, and it is over in three minutes and twenty-four seconds.
Intro
A cold drum-machine pattern and a buzzing synth line set the tone, clipped and mechanical.
Verse 1
The vocal slides in, detached and deliberate, sketching the scene of two people sharing space without sharing much else.
Chorus
The title phrase returns as a hook, cool and repetitive, more mantra than release.
Main Section
Synth layers shift and pulse around the beat, keeping the hypnotic loop alive without breaking its spell.
Outro
The track fades on its machine pulse, as if the lights in the club have gone up and nobody has moved.
Concepts in Focus
Together Alone is classic electroclash: the cold electro and synth-pop of the early 1980s revived around 2000 with deadpan vocals and a taste for performance. UltraSex was influenced by German and British new wave, funk and electronica, and in his early shows Mount Sims performed with three dancers, one of them the choreographer Ryan Heffington. The album was a concept record about technology and sexuality, and this song is its loneliest corner.
The drum machine is what makes the song’s distance audible. A machine keeps perfect time and never leans into a beat the way a drummer does; here that steadiness becomes the emotional point. Listen to how the rhythm never changes its expression while the voice describes two people failing to reach each other: the beat is as unmoved as the relationship.
Artistic Context
Mount Sims is the project of Matthew Sims, a Milwaukee native and former member of the alternative rock band Citizen King, who moved to Los Angeles around 2002 and later to Berlin; he writes, performs and produces almost everything himself, and Mickey Petralia mixed most of UltraSex. The album came out in 2002 on International DeeJay Gigolo Records in Europe and on Emperor Norton Records in the United States, on 1 October 2002. The two editions differ: Together Alone is track two of the American CD and is not on the German Gigolo CD, which is why it is the US release that MusicBrainz links here.
Impact and Reception
Reviews of UltraSex were mixed to good: Rolling Stone found it short of the hooks and humour of other electro revivalists but liked its “slinky devices”, while AllMusic gave it four stars for its “throbbing, sensual slab of neo-electro”. “Together Alone” captures the album’s emotional core better than most: stylish, cold and a little sad. Play it late, alone or together.
