November 5, 2007
A CD brimming with potential and colour, 10 Ways to Kill a Lifetime is a showcase of interesting ideas & musical hybrids. True, the songwriting isn’t always perfect – in some cases you are just left thinking “eh?” as a great dance anthem inexplicably turns into a screamo track – but somehow it still functions.
The vocals on ’10 ways to kill…’ are a long way from perfect but work really well on ‘Better late than never’, a brilliant Radiohead-esque piece. Ultimately the recorded sound still needs a fair bit of work before there can be some sort of equality with the computer sounds – edgy (if only in a good way) is the best adjective I can come up with – but the final product is still acceptable.
The artwork is definitely worth checking out – and without wishing to offend Sonicbob, it might just be the single perfect aspect of this album; bringing to mind Prodigy’s ‘Fat of the Land’ or Warhol’s pictures of Marilyn Monroe.
The single greatest failing of this album is its inability to work as a single entity. Like a number of well-known albums, each song works perfectly well, but together there is no continuum. True, this can be taken too far in the opposite direction (when you begin to wander the lonely path of prog…) but this album feels more like a ten-track sampler than a fully fledged album.
All-in-all a complex view into the mental workshop of an inventor who hasn’t quite got all the parts for his genius creation just yet. My advice: buy the album then watch this space.
The vocals on ’10 ways to kill…’ are a long way from perfect but work really well on ‘Better late than never’, a brilliant Radiohead-esque piece. Ultimately the recorded sound still needs a fair bit of work before there can be some sort of equality with the computer sounds – edgy (if only in a good way) is the best adjective I can come up with – but the final product is still acceptable.
The artwork is definitely worth checking out – and without wishing to offend Sonicbob, it might just be the single perfect aspect of this album; bringing to mind Prodigy’s ‘Fat of the Land’ or Warhol’s pictures of Marilyn Monroe.
The single greatest failing of this album is its inability to work as a single entity. Like a number of well-known albums, each song works perfectly well, but together there is no continuum. True, this can be taken too far in the opposite direction (when you begin to wander the lonely path of prog…) but this album feels more like a ten-track sampler than a fully fledged album.
All-in-all a complex view into the mental workshop of an inventor who hasn’t quite got all the parts for his genius creation just yet. My advice: buy the album then watch this space.