Combichrist – Today we are all Demons

Aggrotech, which as far as I can tell stands for Industrial music with shouting in it.

Combichrist, which I pronounce:
Which doesn’t sound nearly as angry and menacing as you would expect and not nearly as menacing as they seam to want it to sound.

The music is pretty funky, but kind of in the same way that food that’s gone slightly off smells funky.
Maybe it’s a little off for me, because I’m not living in a post-apocalyptic, neo-punk, hyphen inducing world where everyone is raving in the street and setting fire to public officials, but this sounds like a nice way to live and I’ll strive to meet the cultural expectations of Combichrist in the future, so that I may fully appreciate the music.

The music overall is pretty cool and I do really enjoy it, but sometimes it’s a bit too much for me and I’m not in the right context to listen to it. There’s lots of high frequencies and trance influences that seem to make my eyes swivel to the top of my head, which gives me a headache.

I just wish they were a little more DnB and a little less Trance.

Listen to this album: In a post-apocalyptic, neo-punk, hyphen inducing world where everyone is raving in the street and setting fire to public officials.

Rating: 78%

Sent To Destroy

Common – Universal Mind Control

On the making of the album, Common said “I created this music for the summer time, it’s about feeling good… this is the type of music I felt was missing from my body of work.”

Which is why he released it in December!

This album, being the first one I’ve reviewed in ages, is like a horse with a broken leg. It’s struggling to move and it’s dragging it’s nearly dead body through the mud, but you know that it’s going to have to go to the glue factory sooner or later.

This album is like turning up to an empty playground, on your own, in winter. There’s a promise of something fun and nice and exciting, but after 5 minutes of sitting around, maybe going on the swings by yourself, you get incredibly bored and just want to go home, get drunk and shout at the T.V.

There are songs that sound, in the first 4-5 seconds to be kind of entertaining with interesting beats and cool rhythms, but once you hit the 10 second mark, you realize that it’s actually not very good and there ensues the kind of tedium that is usually reserved for maths lessons.

Tedious is probably the best way to describe this album. I may have found a new cure for insomnia.
It’s a shame because I seem to remember Common being pretty cool in the past, but maybe I’m thinking of someone else.

Once I struggle to the end of each song, the next one starts and instantly I recognize the promise of the new song, and again, very quickly, the boredom sets in once more.

Listen to this album: After you’ve brushed your teeth, as you may fall asleep.

Rating: 49%

Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours

The sounds in the heads of drugged insects.

You know when somebody gets turned into an insect on TV and it shows the world from their perspective, and everything sounds like it’s coming from far away and muffled and slightly strange. Well that’s the effect this album has on you. It’s like they just stuck a tiny microphone in the ears of various different insects,and recorded the sounds that came through.

This mess of noises was then fed through a synthesiser and stripped down to it’s most prominent noises and slapped on CD and shipped off for people to listen to. If you listen carefully, you might just hear that conversation you has with your mistress the other week, you thought nobody was listening, but there was a literal fly on the wall that overheard.

All the songs on the album, are quite slow and boring, with glimpses of interesting material in the background that if you listen closely, you’ll just be able to hear, but it seems like too much hard work for such little content.

Listen to this album: Crawling in the grass.

Rating: 63%

Extracts from ‘Out There On The Ice’, ‘Midnight Runner’, ‘Far Away’ and ‘Nobody Lost, Nobody Found’

‘Lights and Music’