Viscera

Album review

The challenge with dark electro music is always to differentiate oneself from the competition while still staying within the strict conventions of the genre. Jasyn Bangert, who records as God Module with the help of vocalist/keyboardist Courtney Bangert and keyboardist Byron C. Miller, strikes the balance between conformity and individuality by keeping his arrangements a little bit less dense and claustrophobic than those of his colleagues, while giving the genre police all the simplistic beats, minor key synth riffs, and thin, harshly grating vocals that they require. Oh, and also by covering the Cure, which is a pretty good joke, especially since Bangert's version of "A Night Like This" is so completely deconstructed and emptied of melody that you'd probably never recognize it if you didn't read the notes. Other, more subtle departures from the darkwave norm include the relatively slow and almost tender "Still So Strange" and "Sections," a song written in 12/8 that prominently features the cool, dispassionate singing of Courtney Bangert, whose voice is a welcome reprieve from the hissing malevolence that dominates elsewhere. But then, if you had a problem with hissing malevolence you wouldn't have put this disc in the player to begin with.

© Rick Anderson /TiVo