Bear with me a second. Here is an American band that want us to be happy, and consequently, within this album they have embedded various forms of brain wave stimulation known as Binaural Tones. These tones are scientifically proven to enrich feelings of relaxation, focus, creativity, and happiness through inaudible changes in audio frequencies. Apparently. I don’t know about feeling happy while playing this, but I found it to be quite a choppy mixed-up album that is somewhat confusing to listen to. They can go from Meshuggah style polymetric passages into Muse soundscapes without warning and the result is that I came away thinking that they were very clever at what they are doing, and that they are good musicians. Didn’t like it a lot though...
For me this is too all over the place, and that there is no real rationale behind it. Now, I can listen to “unusual” music more than most, and in many ways, this is mainstream, but I found myself getting frustrated and unsettled as opposed to being put into some sort of artificial nirvana. Some of the tricks such as the sound of a needle on vinyl at the beginning of “Peril” I found annoying, and as for the sounds at the end of “Inside The Womb” they just went on for way too long. I listened right to the very end just in case something interesting happened, but it didn’t.
I am sure that there are many out there who will hail this as a masterpiece, and I have seen a few reviews comparing them to Riverside, but while there are some musical similarities at times, the Polish band is so far removed in terms of material to be on another planet. Not one to which I can see myself returning.
