Modern cybergrind? The discovery of this album by Blind Equation out of Chicago suggests something colourful. What we’re being offered has influences in grind, atmospheric black metal, 8-bit electronics and Eurotrance. Quite a ride, then. Or as they have it, “interpersonal disarray and suffering in its rawest and most confessional form”.
The opener sounded to me as if Cradle of Filth had entered an amusement arcade, or a family entertainment centre as they are called in some places. Video games meet black metal. Very jolly, even if the title is “death awaits”. It’s all in lower case. Our keyboard video game operator can’t be restrained and plays a jolly horror tune at a rapid rate of knots while people scream and growl. “speedrunning life” it is, and I’m not making much sense of it. My wish for something different was in part addressed at the melancholic start of “you betrayed the ones you loved” but those tinkly keyboards from the video game of your choice soon return. The vocal effects are interesting and gave some personality to this strange brew of frantic synth tinkling and deathly hardcore vocals. “fade away” sweeps us away into a high adrenaline keyboard fest but once again the interest lies in the sound effects and the total breakdown at the end. I pondered the claim of “interpersonal disarray and suffering” – yes, there’s plenty of that.
I had come to expect hardcore and video gamery as the standard package and means of expressing it. It works best for me when the two aren’t in opposition and come together as they do on “never getting better”. The produced vocals fit better, even if they sound a bit playground childish, and the synth bass sound fits the mood without losing the frantic energy of the electronica. Cascades of cyber synth are the foil to the angry energy of “killing me”. The vocal effects recall The Buggles or New Musik. The delivery made me to half expect a hardcore version of the latter’s “World of Water” to appear. It didn’t. To their credit Blind Equation don’t hold back and fuel the vocalist’s anger with the rapid and flourishes of energy of the electronic keyboard, and well, we get what we get. Even the jolly keyboard is reduced to distortion and despair on “suffering in silence”, and momentarily there is harmony in the despair but true to form, the synthesised drum and keyboard recover and send us racing away to the end with the vocalist emitting his anger and frustration. The start of “warmth” was like a rapid-fire version of OMD’s “Enola Gay” but soon all hell breaks loose and it’s a whirlwind of brutal vocals and keyboard frippery. “the last glimpse of me”, the final song, is clearly intended to spread a darker atmosphere but it’s quite hard to do with these dominant and playful cyber-orientated keyboards. This was a drawback with the album as a whole, I found.
This might not be everyone’s cup of tea. I’m not sure about it myself, mainly because those video game sound effects didn’t really sit with the anger behind it all. The highlights for me were the breakdowns and use of sound effects. Here are there I sensed something harmonious, at least in terms of atmosphere and direction. One thing I did observe was that the album seemed to be over in 5 minutes – it lasts 29 minutes in reality – and this is because Blind Equation don’t waste time. They get on with it, and without doubt this album has life, and whether intentionally or not, there’s an element of fun in there.
(5/10 Andrew Doherty)
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