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It starts off with the "EBM Intro", a sample-laden bit that takes us into the album, and a pretty normal thing on an EBM CD these days. "Everything We Know Is Wrong" fulfills this role, with a section of a sampled lecture from some alternative "scientist" giving his views on historical alien encounters. This moves without any type of break into "Starsign" a hard-hitting yet soaring and beautiful dance song. This song in turn morphs seamlessly into "Eclipse", another hard-hitting song that straddles EBM and synthpop quite nicely. Both of these songs are extremely good, light on samples and distortion, heavy on melody, catchiness and pounding dance rhythms. Both are also hard to classify as not synthpop, although they would be about the heaviest representatives of that genre I could think of. "Help Me!" with lyrics generally sampled, rather than performed, and with some strange Australian outback sounds to it, is not particularly attractive, and comes across as filler in this situation. "Kathy's Song (Come Lie Next to Me) on the other hand, is an incredible song (also as a very good single, with remixes by VNV Nation and Beborn Beton, among others.) Like the songs before it, it is quite light on the vocals, although it does have a dance beat. This one isn't nearly so pounding, and the samples and synthwork are almost tender rather than simply hard. This song is highly recommended. "Untitled 3" is an instrumental/sample track that is surprisingly spooky and evocative. The samples come across as the tense, nearly panicked story of an alien abductee undergoing regression hypnosis, and the "alien sounds" including the menacing "alien laughter" at the end are actually incredibly effective. In fact, they work so well that my two-year old daughter actually gets scared listening to this song. "Moment of Tranquility", although it starts out with the old samples, quickly turns from any EBM influence at all, and is a tender and moving synthpop ballad. Not what I expected from APB, yet remarkably effective nonetheless. This slowness and tenderness don't last long, of course, as a pulsing Metallica cover done in a hard EBM style is next as "Fade to Black". The chimes are a nice touch, and this is actually one of the more effective songs on an already very effective CD. "64K" is one of those weird filler tracks that EBM CDs often have, although there are vocals here, if you can make them out. Still, definately skip material. "Paranoia" is another one of those extremely hard-hitting synthpop songs, with a trace of it's EBM roots. This version is extremely long, and much of it's length is in an odd outro. It almost sounds as if the song ended, but Stephan just didn't want to give it up, so the end of the song is dragged out to almost half of the 8+ minute length. Other than that, though, it's a very good song. In fact, the last really good one of the CD, though. "Soultaker" has some lyrics, but it still comes across as an instrumental, as they are scanty and late in the song. "LNDP 3" is another relatively filler piece, with guest female vocals (which I can't seem to find credited in the liner notes, for some reason.) It's a slow song, but without the finely crafted melody of "Moments of Tranquility", for example. "Time to Move On" starts out with church bells, making one wonder what they mean by moving on, but it then turns into a strange percussion-less instrumental that fades to silence after a few minutes and continues marching the track along with no sound for some time. Then, after nearly seven minutes of silence, the track has some sound again; a strange instrumental dancey little ditty, that sounds occasionally like it was made with an old Pac-Man machine and a tape player being played with fast forward on. After a few minutes of this, the song (and the CD) finally come to an end.
Although Welcome to Earth certainly has its moments of dead space and filler, when it's good, it's incredible. Perhaps, in part, this is because you don't really know if it's synthpop with a heavy EBM overlay, or if it's EBM that's trying really hard to be melodic and synthpop-ish, but the fusion of the two styles is very compelling and attractive. Of course, APB isn't the only one fusing the two styles: VNV Nation have been doing their own version of it for some time as well, Fictional comes close to a hybrid form, and Covenants latest work, like APB's is a very tough call. But, as you'd expect, APB does it with confidence, style and skill, and they deserve the success they've had not only with this album, but with all three of the singles released to date from it.
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