Muta-scuM - Idle Worship

Since I have already covered Muta-scuM's history in my review of their EP "Bad Friday", I shall be skipping ahead into the review portion of this album and leaving the previous hyperlink up for any curious party to dive into. 

I am going to start with two tracks on the album that have already been discussed before. Those are 'Lying Idol' and 'Bad Friday'. I have detailed my thoughts on these tracks on my reviews of Mua-scuM's EPs that share the same name as the tracks previously. To quote myself from those reviews, 'Lying Idol' is a "a decent piece filled with vocal samples, I could not find many words to describe it other than that it's a noisey breakbeat piece" while I found 'Bad Friday' to be messy, with some of the higher pitched notes being "an irritant on subsequent listens". To say the very least, they are not the best songs found within Muta-scuM's discography. 

The start of the album is not stellar as it begins with 'Inhale'. It's an electronic ambient piece that gives sci-fi visions, but sounds very uninspired and bland in comparison to similar pieces I've heard in the past. The next track follows Muta-scuM's formula of digging through breakbeat tunes and noisey samples. Lots of scratching arises in this track. However, I feel as if the track ran on for too long; there's not enough meat that kept me interested for five-minutes and eighteen-seconds on each run. I found the addition of the electronic beat around the two-minute and fifty second mark to give the song a bit of a refresher, but after forty-five seconds of it I was done with the song and wanted to move onto the next. 



'Life_Online' is a track that seems to take some influence from house music thanks to the high energy dance synths that line the background of the track. The spoken word samples within the song are fairly misplaced and do not fit in with the beat of the track; that needed fine tuning to fit. Aside from the generic dance synths, however, there's a decent crunchy rhythmic noise track found. I don't think this track warranted four-minutes and twenty-six seconds total, but it wasn't bad. The beginning of 'Welcome to the Meat Grinder' has a very high pitched screech that sounds like it came out of a Gameboy Color. Despite anything else I may say about the song, that sound turned me off from the track completely on further playthroughs. I found myself wincing at the sound and immediately hit the skip button on repeated plays of the album. 

'Rebuilding Jericho' starts out as if it's about to descend into a modern eurodance hit, but soon enough somewhat crunchy bass shows cracks in the seams. This breaks down into a mechanical monster of a track that sounds like what death machines would listen to for fun. It's a wicked song and the best that I heard from Muta-scuM thus far. A breakbeat fest titled 'As The Fires Burn Out' comes in next. It's a fairly minimal song that usually sticks to one sound palette or another. It's fast-paced, quick, and quirky, but altogether became a song I never really looked forward to on "Idle Worship". 

From 'Porn Scars' and onward, I felt as if the sound palette that Muta-scuM had been playing with throughout the album was used and abused to the point of unoriginality. Each track after this (with one sole exception) sounded more or less like remixes or collaborations of previous songs found on the album. I got that far and found myself bored of the rest of the tracks while I waited for something new. They're average at best, and left me a little disappointed. The sole exception is 'Under Me', which is another ambient piece infiltrated by hits of bass and glitchiness here and there. But, again, it's nothing special. 

Muta-scuM's "Idle Worship", then, is an album seeping with potential. This is a music enthusiast that knows how to put together a song. However, the further you go on in the album, the less refreshing it becomes, and the more the sound palette begins to grow stale. I absolutely love the shit out of 'Rebuilding Jericho'; it's a track that never gets old for me and I find myself stomping a bit to the beat. But it's the only song on the album that I really find myself wishing to hear again. If Muta-scuM can find a new array of sounds to include in their input, then I think they're going to do well. As of right now, though, "Idle Worship" is an album that's just passable at best. Five-and-a-half out of ten. 

This review was commissioned through our Ko-fi page.
Aug 09 2021