Chiildren - The Other People

Chiildren (yes, that's two i's in the name. One wasn't enough for them.) is a somewhat disturbing project, at least in imagery. You see, when I first garnered upon The Other People's cover art, I was greeted with two men painted a darker shade of grey carrying a third man to some unknown destination. With the wicked grin and wide eyes of one of the darkly painted men, I could only assume that the man being dragged was to be tortured to death and sacrificed to Satan. Or just brutally beaten in an otherwise destructive manner.

Anyway, Chiildren is an industrial and metal hybrid, but I wouldn't quite put them under the industrial metal genre. They combine a lot of different aesthetics for their project, such as drone noises, metal (as already stated), and electronics into one neat little melting pot. That's if the melting pot was being mixed by an evil witch.

And, I'm quite enjoying their twisted album at the time being. I wouldn't say it's jaw dropping, but it's good nonetheless, and it surprises me that the drone effects work so well with the metal. It really is two opposite ends of the spectrum being put into one musical adventure. I mean, drone is usually quite slow, and metal is usually faster paced and angry, however, this works.

Girl in the Dirt Begins off not necessarily with that drone effect, but with just slow electronics that don't really tread the ground of being too ominous, but as the song progresses, we get into a grind, with the metal guitars coming in every so often and fading away just as they come in. About half way into the song, we get into complete metal mode, with the screaming vocals pounding your head into the ground and everything else just trying to be absolutely vicious.

Other People definitely relied more on the electronics this time around, but the guitar is still there. It loops; the guitars and electronics seem to loop a bit too often. Nonetheless, it's a decent song and it's one I could listen to again, despite the vocals feeling a bit too faded at times.

I really couldn't find much to say about Milos, which is never a good sign. It just means that it's an alright song, mediocre at best, for if it was good or even wonderful, I would have much praise for it. But, at least it's perfunctory, and not horrible, for then I would be ripping my hair out and cursing the name of this band.

And then we finally come along to My Gods which is a song I've been wanting to speak of since I began writing this review. I really enjoyed this one, as it has awesome drum work, with deep bass and a focus on just getting as pissed off as you can at your drums while screaming. And, it's another song which slows down the tempo, eerily letting you take in all the sounds as they come along to you. I really enjoyed this one. Which made the final song very disappointing.

Yes, most of the songs were very metal inspired, and I was hoping it would stay this way, but then Posy Misogyny came along and just took everything down a notch. I wouldn't really call this metal inspired at all, but it flips the genre and goes just into industrial rock in a sense. The vocals take a switch from being angry to very calm, which was a shocker, and they were alright, but not great. However, they did make a return to form at the final forty five seconds of the song, bringing back the hate infested screaming. But, still, I really didn't enjoy this one too much for the sole fact that I was enjoying what Chiildren was doing with everything beforehand, and I wanted to see what else they could do with the metal and drone aspects.

So, all in all, I enjoyed most of what Chiildren gave to me on this album. I mean, three of the five songs were good, with one being okay, and the last being not to my liking. Needless to say, I enjoy the project's look and feel, music and noise, and I wanna hear more from them; hopefully sometime soon. I suppose that's a hint to these fellows to bring me more misanthropic music. Aug 29 2013