Zombi - Escape Velocity

(Tell You) About Phaedra

Why Sequencers Only Work in Italian Horror
-- OR --
Edgar Froese, Go Home!

Looking back, Tangerine Dream never fulfilled the promise of their first four albums, not that they needed to. From Electronic Meditation on through Atem, TD insinuated more and more shuddering ferocity into their music, while removing anything remotely resembling melody, harmony, and repetition. Then, they blew it all with Phaedra, a sequencer-driven jelly-filled-sock of an album that managed to sound like a total inversion of their most successful formula. In terms of scope, they went from sounds emulating cosmic birth and death to soundtracks for bad underwater chase scenes.

I really enjoyed Zombi's 2005 full-length Surface to Air, though perhaps not as much as Claudio Simonetti's soundtrack work to which the band pays homage. Zombi are yet another band adding little to an already well-defined genre, but doing what they do well, and filling a niche that is seemingly left open for their target audience. They take distinctly 70s-sounding synths (usually a couple of the pad/fake string variety, then a couple bass tones, and lastly some goofy sequencer to reinforce the beat), add some drums, and let things fester for 5-10 minutes. The outcome is a specific type of prog rehash, the kind best accompanied by old movie visuals or underwater documentary footage. To distill their attitude down to a word: menace.

That's why Escape Velocity leaves me completely cold: there's nothing here even VAGUELY menacing. It comes off as more of a poor Phaedra imitation than anything else, attempting to streamline the band's sound, but really just detracting. Instead of leaving behind the necessities, they've scraped the palette clean and removed all of the shadowy territory that made the earlier work more convincing (though that's still not saying much). In doing this, they've managed to create the aural equivalent of a dull grey that believes itself deepest black and cavorts most inappropriately.

Sadly, the coolest thing about this album is the cover, which--while eye-catching--really says it all. Instead of the glacial grandeur of Surface to Air, or the obvious-yet-still-classy cover for 2009's Spirit Animal, which both embodied a similar epic scope musically (and instilled a similar anxiety and awe), we get a picture of a naked woman running off a pier into oblivion with a bat-winged DeLorean in the foreground: this is Chillwave territory. So instead of more haunting traipses through soundtracks for nonexistent horror films, we're given a suburbia with an inappropriate intensity. These guys need to listen to some Rangers, and get their heads straight.

On tracks like "DE3", the techno vibe is definitely present, but more due to the up-tempo pounding bass drum than any change in instrumentation. Inspiration-wise, we're in Demons 2 territory, as opposed to the usual Deep Red territory, or the classic Lucio Fulci film from which the band derive their name.

Honestly, I'm pretty bored by this release, and probably won't play it more than two or three times before forgetting about it. In the past, even when I've found Zombi's work profoundly uninspired, it's at least provided a good soundtrack (usually for "House of the Dead"-style video games). This album, however, only has one track that I can even marginally get into: the closing "Time of Troubles", which sounds like it would not be completely out of place on a Puerto Rico Flowers album. Over a dolorous beat--the slowest on the album--band members A.E. Paterra and Steve Moore layer moody synths that hint more at gothy atmosphere a la Closer than Goblin, although the overall effect is more depressed than doomy, more bored than suspenseful.  Which really says it all: at its most engaging, this album is inoffensive, and at its worst, pointlessly unendurable.  I guess that makes it a pretty successful evocation of their namesake after all, then.