This review was commissioned. However, it bears no weight on the score or decision. All reviews are written from an unbiased standpoint.
Whenever I see a project list songs titled the likes of ‘Power Slave’ and ‘Infernal Bitch’ in their tracklisting I know I’m going to be in for a rough time at least ninety five percent of the time. And that rings true for Frank Fear who released their album “Christiana Mors” via the triad rec recently. And, keeping with the site’s namesake, I’m gonna be Brutal. This album is awful. Let’s find out why.
As much as I approve of experimental music I cannot whole heartedly approve of the opening track ‘Christiana Mors’. It sounds like it’s the intro of a song that lasts for seven minutes in length and never really gets anywhere. There are a ton of interesting elements such as the whirring ambiance found in the beginning and the choral synths a la church recordings but in the end it doesn’t really amount to much. It feels like thirteen cassette tapes were spliced and then taped together and the cuts are so jarring that you can hear where each song ended and another came.
‘Somewhere in Time’ avoids that mistake entirely and comes off as a serene and moody piece. The length is a bit much coming in at around five-and-a-half minutes with repetition the only thing holding it all together. There are moments for eerie synth lines like something out of a retro horror film and moments where drum pads and echoed and faded voices come together. If it was shorted I’d have liked it more.
‘Moon Over Moscow’ sounds like an unproduced mess, as if you’re outside of a Japanese arcade and you can just hear the muffled elements of the machines tossed about. The only thing this song is missing are the squeals of anime characters to finish the job.
‘Amerika!’ samples Rammstein’s vocals from the song of the same name and I find that to be pretty boring and tame and a blatant rip off. It would have been one thing to attempt to cover the track but it’s another to steal from someone else’s work entirely without even attempting to masquerade the attempt. This song, if it was rated on its own, would have gotten a flat 0 out of 10 from me.
‘I’m Goin to Need You’ wants to be techno but simply isn’t and uses the voice of GLaDOS from Portal as a sample. ‘Power Slave’ is the closest thing out of the previous two tracks that we get as an actual song. Raw and noisy techno with time for xylophone breaks and extremely lo-fi vox. Nothing grand, though; it still comes off as a work in progress that was never finished.
And, honestly, I could spend the next couple of paragraphs talking about why this album just doesn’t work but I’m going to cut it short here. ‘Problem’ is a problem as it sounds off as an improv jam session that doesn’t work out and is filled with drum pads as if a toddler was wailing on buttons that they didn’t know what they could do. ‘You Are’ sounds completely out of place on the album as the only thing that sounds produced but is generally mediocre and the final track on the album ‘V2 Fur Amerika!’ again steals from Rammstein.
If there’s any other song on the album that deserves some recognition it would be that of ‘Hypnosis’ which sounds decent. A small poke of ambiance plays out in the beginning before slow and -dare I say – hypnotic IDM elements come to the foreground. It’s not groundbreaking and it won’t turn any major heads but at least there’s a glimpse of musicianship amongst the raucous.
Look, I understand the roots of industrial (or at least I hope I would considering the site is primarily about industrial music) but there’s a point where blatantly ripping vox or samples from another platform without so much as crediting the source material or original artist becomes an issue despite of what you may think of the media or artist, so on and so forth. Without that being an issue, however, we’re still left with an unproduced mess of an album that never knows what it wants to be. “Oh, but Steve, this is an experimental album, it’s supposed to be like that.” Yeah, I heard that argument, and I don’t buy it anymore. That’s not an excuse for laziness. Flat 2 out of 10.
