IAMX - The Unified Field

Chris Corner is back with his fifth studio album as IAMX. What separates his latest effort from the other ones? Well not that much except one thing, the greatest song he has ever made is on this album.

The album kicks it off with the theatrical and quite pleasing "I Come With Knives", followed by the more toned down and sad "Sorrow". By now you can clearly get a sense of what the album is all about before it turns around on the third track, the title track, which is the most beautiful and perfectly composed track from IAMX by far. I could play this track over and over and over again. It's the sort of track you easily could get stuck on, forgetting all about the rest of the album. For review purposes I had to spin the whole album as well, but the only song that really got stuck in my head was "The Unified Field".

It's not that the other songs are bad, but their not that great either. They really can't follow the standard set by the title track and in the end they just seem like B-sides or leftover material.

It gets a bit better towards the end of the album in the form of the track "Walk With The Noise" which kicks things up a bit with a nice drumbeat and a playful melody. Other than that the album is quite anonymous with the exceptions of the tracks I've already praised.

The 'Unified Field' is similar to the older albums in the way that it has a handful of good songs and a handful of just plain boring and unnecessary songs.

In the end it becomes way to uneven to give it anything more than just above average, and if it hadn't been for the epic title track, it would just have been a collection of pure boredom. And it really is a shame because Chris Corner is a good songwriter, he just doesn't seem to be able to keep the quality through a whole album. If you take all the good songs from his past albums and put them together with this one I'm sure he could release a great best of album and in that way make his best album to date.

For now 'The Unified Field' is a mediocre affair and one song isn't able to save a whole album. May 03 2013