Band: Mind.In.A.Box

Album: Crossroads

Year: 2007

Label: Metropolis

Genre: Futurepop, EBM

Tracklist:
 

Crossroads is the newest offering from Austria’s futurepop duo Mind.In.A.Box. To set the stage, I am a huge fan of their debut Lost Alone and I hated the follow-up Dreamweb. Luckily, it appears that in a sense MIAB is ‘back’, and Crossroads is an enjoyable album that utilizes the factors that made Lost Alone great while pushing ahead into new territory. Stylistically, Crossroads is fairly standard MIAB, although there is definitely a more professional sound and feel to this album. The songs try for a more epic and mature feel, many of them clocking in at 7 minutes or more. I feel like MIAB has always been able to write fairly diverse songs (that is, a single song having a variety of parts and elements), and that definitely continues here, but the length of some of the tracks does not bear the same fruit. In tracks like “Amnesia”, the length is hardly noticeable and the song flows and drives unnoticeably to seven and a half minutes, but in other songs such as “Identity” the song loses direction after the second chorus and degenerates into a boring bridge/outro that seems to drag on directionlessly into infinity. My other qualm is that it sounds like they are using crappy softsynths, but the mixing and production is excellent enough to overlook this shortcoming.

Crossroads seems to be made up of two types of songs (and then two pointless 20 second interludes which involve one sentence of spoken word). The first type of song involves awesome upbeat melodic futurepop music with some monotonous spoken word vocals that repeat the same line or set of lines about 15 times. The second type of song is a somewhat epic futurepop track which uses his trademark vocoded vocals. One of the things that turned me off most about Dreamweb was the lack of vocoding. I am very happy to say that MIAB is back to using a vocoder on almost every track and it still sounds great. The first type of song I referred to appears only a few times on the album, but these are the tracks that I can’t quite get myself to enjoy. The music for them is great and driving, but the unemotional and frankly uninteresting nature of the vocals and lyrics turns me off every time. The second type of track, of which there are far more, and generally pretty excellent and catchy, and will please any fan of MIAB. In the past (at least on Lost Alone of which I am more familiar) it seems that MIAB focused on slower, sadder, minimalist songs, whereas on Crossroads they are working more with upbeat synth-heavy tracks. They pull it off very well and it is a welcome change. “Amnesia” is the only track in my opinion that “sounds like old MIAB”.

Musicially, Crossroads is awesome. Every track is thickly textured with a lot going on and almost always driving. There are a lot of upbeat and clubby pieces on here that are hopefully going to get MIAB a lot of club recognition. There are a ton of cool futurepop-y melodies and the songs showcase solid and dynamic construction. As is in the past, MIAB defies the status quo and relies more on rhythm and forgoes obnoxious and overdone trance synths.

There are only a few flaws with the album. I mentioned the extended song length which can be annoying, but you can remedy it by just hitting ‘next’. Another other flaw that cannot be easily corrected are the lyrics and consequently the vocals. Most of the time the lyrics are pretty cool and the vocals are performed in a catchy manner. But sometimes it just seems like they are trying too hard to be complex or dynamic or whatever and the lyrics are just lame and as a result the vocals just sound stupid. One example is “Fear”. Now, instead of making nice catchy couplets for the verse, they try to embolden the lyrical content or whatever and so the second line of the couplet has too many syllables and doesn’t rhyme so it just sounds…wrong. Most of the songs use ABAB rhyme scheme instead of AABB and I find it annoying. Ok so maybe the writing is “better” in ABAB, but it sounds worse. Sorry MIAB, but when I listen to an awesome vocoder I really just want to hear catchy vocals. The final major flaw is the clean vocals. Now they are recorded well and production wise they are great, but they are so bland. In previous MIAB there were clean vocals or talking sections and they sounded awesome and really added to the tracks. This time around, most of the clean vocals and all of the talking parts completely lack any sort of emotion or interest. They are bland and monotonous and it’s just like “what the hell, they did these well before, what happened?”. Maybe too much focus on ‘story’ and not enough on emotion or purpose.

Overall, Crossroads is a solid third album for the band, and in my opinion a huge step forward from Dreamweb. I believe that it would please any fan of previous work by MIAB, and if you haven’t heard MIAB then it would be a good place to start. Mind.In.A.Box have always sort of been the “ideal futurepop” band to me (sad, minimalist cyberpunk futurepop…the perfect formula and they executed it perfectly on Lost Alone), and after listening to Crossroads I feel like they are still worthy of that title.  I would encourage everyone who is into the album to buy the record, if only for the booklet. The booklet is something like 20 pages long and includes a full ‘storyline’ for the album. While the story line isn’t that amazing and you’ve definitely heard it before (William Gibson, The Matrix, etc), it is still a cool concept that brings additional clarity to the songs/lyrics and something that I feel is lacking with the current industrial music scene.

-[.d4n b4rr3tt.]

october 2007