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The first track, "The System" is easy to find since an extremely conservative remix of it shows up on A Different Drum's Mix Rinse and Spin Volume 2 album. It's a good dance song, with powerful synthworks, especially in the nice coda. The lyrics are kinda silly, although the theme about governments abusing the populace is perfectly in line with the almost EBM sound of this song. Next is "Blue Lights," the first song I heard from the group, and I still think their best. It is very danceable, and has a nice "family relationship" with "The System" and even more so with Ravenous, since it features the same vocalist, but I also think it's probably the most synthpop-like of the songs here, with a beautiful chorus and probably the best lyrics here, although there are a few grammatical mistakes. Frankly, though, I'd rather have the grammatical mistakes than the unintentional silliness of a lot of the lyrics on this album. These lyrics hamper "Hangman" somewhat, which otherwise would be a great EBM song, with a nice dance beat, EBM distorted vocals on the chorus, and lots of nifty synthwork. The theme is probably based on the same idea as Apoptygma Berzerk's "Burning Heretics" except here the protagonist is taken for a witch, tortured and hung. Yeah, it's a good enough EBM theme, but the lyrics are ridiculously trite. It's a little bit harder to mess up "Your Dream" since it's an instrumental that starts off ethereal and reed-flutey, and develops into a nice techno-like dance song. "On Helloween" is also a good standard EBM song in sound, with synthwork that is very reminiscent of some the big names in that outfit today: VNV Nation, Apoptygma Berzerk or Covenant. The vocals also are nice and growled in a distorted fashion. The theme has to do with some hooligans of some kind who killed his girlfriend, and his subsequent quest for revenge. However, it's hard to take that theme seriously with the lyrics here. I'm serious; if Mystery Science Theater 3000 did music, they'd have a heyday with the lyrics here. In "Nightmre" the lyrics aren't so much laughable as they are simply awkward. The written lyrics are even worse, with an incredible amount of either grammatical errors or typos (it's hard to tell which they truly are.) Other than that, the slow, dreamy sound fits the theme and makes it a nice contrast to the more dance-oriented songs we've had so far. "Dream of God" is another song that is one of the better one's here (and lucky Tim Fockenbrock of Ravenous gets to sing it -- he has the best luck! Either that, or the most melodious, synthpop-like voice...) The sung vocals are only mildly distorted giving the song a synthpop-like veneer, but other than that, this song is one of the harder, most drastically EBM-like songs on the album, with lots of "factory noise" and other harsh EBM synth-sounds. And, the lyrics, while certainly not excellent, are not so bad as to actually detract from the music either. The lyrics on "Starlight" are similarly not too bad, but the uncanny resemblance of the chorus to Apoptygma Berzerk's "Ashes to Ashes" is downright scary. Other than that, the song is a nice one, with heavily distorted vocals on the verses and a heavy ambient leaning in the sound, making it more "dark leisurely" rather than "pounding violence" like EBM so often has as it's mood. "Former Occupants" also crosses genre's slightly, with a very techno-like sound and very muted "vocals" that sound like they could have been sung by a Cylon Centurion from Battlestar Galactica. Again, like you'd expect by now, the lyrics are pretty bad. The final song, "Future" sounds almost like it's very "Pimph"-influenced with dark, sweeping piano lines backed up with synthetic blurbs and beeps, but no percussion. The vocals sound like they were sung by the Volga Boatman Choir, if such a thing could exist. It's interesting as yet another experimental piece, taking an EBM theme and some EBM elements and adapting it to a completely different kind of music.
Overall, this CD is musically very interesting: the songs hang together despite their disparate and experimental nature and most are either properly dark, or great pounding dance anthems in the time-honored EBM style. However, the lyrics are never good, and often-times so atrocious that they actually detract from the song.
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