Amphibious

Post-partum Depression
by: matt cibula

There is such a thing as due diligence when it comes to music reviews, and this album is a perfect example of why. The first time I heard it, I thought it was pretty cool: dark techno with some operatic creepy lyrics and a very gloomy vibe. Hey: originality! That's good, right?

But then I listened again, because that's my job, and I changed my mind completely. It's still dark techno with vocals and a serious undertow to it -- but it's not really all that cool after all. Maybe it's because I'm not a goth dance maven. My worldview can be kinda bleak sometimes, but not so bleak that I need songs like "Close Enough," with its indecipherable and out-of-tune vocals from main man Eric Monse. And then there's the album's centerpiece, "A Complex God." This song is so important that they actually print the lyrics to it, little realizing that that enables mean critics like me to quote yucky and pretentious stuff like "I put the sky line on your tongue / Eyelids painted open until the dawn had come." Ew.

I think Monse and his partners in crime are working for a very specific market: young people who hate everything about the world but still feel the need to shake their skinny pale asses. Since I don't belong to that subgroup, I don't ever want to hear this album again. 21-Oct-2002 4:00 PM