Damn. This is one of the best looking self-released CD's I've seen in my entire life, hands down. The layout is fucking amazing and totally professional across the board. It caught my eye right away, the colors are great, the text is clean and compact, it's all consistent. Very fucking nice. It's too bad the music is total crap. Fairly professionally handled crap, mind you, but crap all the same. It's basically poppy new wave/industrial music with a really slick recording. The band compares their sound to a mesh of Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, KMFDM, Gary Numan, and Trent Reznor, and I can hear stuff that reminds me of Real Life as well as some more modern and perhaps radio friendly song structure and choruses, but it's just not my thing. Something about it's not as dark as Bauhaus or Sisters of Mercy, I catch very little KMFDM or Nine Inch Nails (aside from a pretty typical sheen of that catch-all industrial guitar tone and the basic song structures of "Pretty Hate Machine"-esque tracks like parts of "Second Skin"), and it's just not interesting to me at all. Right off the bat I'll tell you that I am not a fan of this style of music. I like mid-period Ministry and I can deal with some of the 80's sort of stuff that sort of laid the base for this style, but I'm just not a fan of it in general. I can of course point out that the recording here is very nice, and the songs are competently written (though still a bit bland)... but something seems off. I don't know anything about the band, and they seem to have their heads in the right place, but something about a few underlying influences here (occasionally rap-ish vocal patterns, generic synth tones and beats, straightforward verse/chorus structures) seems like they're trying too hard to "hit it big" or something. Take the painfully groovy nu-metal chords and weird bluesy tinged singing of "Spitshine", for example. No thanks. I just can't listen to this stuff. I'm amazed at how awesome the disc looks, but musically this does nothing for me at all... Sorry.
[self-released]
Running time - 45:28, Tracks: 11
[Notable tracks: they all seem fairly similar and nondescript]
Carfax Abbey - http://www.carfaxabbey.com
