[dubman]

so i went to a listening party for this thing.

its kind of interesting that in being so beat heavy, the only interesting thing he does, besides throw down with some loud shit, is what he does with the squelches of noise that pretty much have a running theme throughout the album.
not anything mindblowing, but used to really good rhythmic effect.
this is what with teeth should have been, and i understand how that album needed to exist before this one, but people wouldnt question his ability to gut punch the audience if he had folowed up the fragile with this one instead. still the distorted angry pop tune, but still feels much more like NIN and not a xerox.
he's not doing anything new, he's just developing it much tighter.
so the album is good. only a couple of filler tracks, and the good news is that they sound like filler tracks because it's not as active or urgent as the other songs, not because they're actively bad. the greater good was a quasi-instrumental with no movement, and "the warning" was boring. there were a couple where i froze and look at my friends a bit going "oh.... that's good" like on vessel (i think) and the great destroyer. there another one where it kinda chugged along on its robust thing until it let fly with this squall that sounded like an elephant. it was rad.

but yeah, the key word here is robust. those drums are guns, and while they may be unwieldly and not really dynamic, it's all the noise behind it that propel their momentum. it flirts a little dangerously with making me think of the industry's really horrid ides of what cyberpunk sounded like in 1997, but reznor good enough to safely avoid it. it really is just stripped down so much that it reminded a few people of pretty hate machine.

i'm leaving out a lot of tracks because honestly my memory is kinda shit to begin with and i spent about 5 hrs after being totally stoned, but i clearly remember that it's at the very least a decent album, and might get better on home listening justbecause you can have all that squallid shit to yourself and not echoing all over the place.
so far, avoiding the excitement and "oh yea" factor of a new album and really just facing it squarely, i'd give it a 7/10
but really on terms of the actual entertainment and fun i'm going to get out of this makes it actually a solid 8/10.

i'm happy.