Band: Total Pain Kollapz

Album: Hell Is Not Heaven

Album Year: 2007

Label: hypervoxx

Genre(s): industrial noize, shit

Band Website:

Review Date: 2/07

Rating: 2/10

Track List:

don't worry about it

Oh boy, another artist on Hypervoxx. Well, honestly, my initial perception of this album was not particularly good. With a name like Total Pain Kollapz and song titles as imaginative as "u = dead", I thought some label was playing a joke on me and sending me rap demos. The packaging on this isn't much better, the art is very simple and low quality; it honestly looks like something that would be sold at the dollar store, or one of the used albums at record and tape traders for 1.99. We all know the saying, don't judge a book by its cover, but it is inevitable that occasionally first impressions are correct. Oh, how correct it was...

I don't know how the fuck bands like this get signed, or why the fuck labels exist to release shit like this album. Total Pain Kollapz, as you can tell from the name, is a fucking joke of a band. To their credit, the music isn't the worst thing I have ever heard, but that isn't saying much (yay fruity loops preset sound library!). The production is alright; you can hear the two synth lines per song, and the mediocre and unimaginative drumbeats clearly. That is about it for the high points for this album. The composition would almost be acceptable, if only every song wasn't the same sounds looped over and over and over for five to six grueling minutes. The songs are good for about 20 seconds, until all 5 or 6 sounds have been introduced, and at that point you have more been exposed to everything that will happen in that track. The sounds chosen for this album aren't terrible, but they do sound somewhat random and fail to achieve any cohesion or fluidity, and fail to create any sort of atmosphere or mood. Apparently TPK is supposed to be an anger management project, but I completely fail to get any feeling of anger or pain out of it...well maybe the pain of me wasting my own existence.  Musically, it sounds like pretty generic sub-par industrial noize, and well...there is really nothing more I can say about the music of Total Pain Kollapz. If you've heard 20 seconds of one track, then you've heard them all.

So, now you are thinking "wow, he really trashed this album, what could be left to say?" Oh, but there is more. The songs also contain an additional element which is apparently supposed to pass as "vocals". Now I have heard a lot of vocal styles in my time, but this is just fucking unacceptable. Instead of spending 10$ on a microphone, this guy just uses a fucking cheap speech synthesizer (where you type in words and it "speaks" it...his sounds just like the one in Fruity Loops). Now I cannot stress how fucking terrible this sounds. A thousand times worse than whispery Grendel on End of Ages. Much worse even than Combichrist. These "vocals" are done using the lowest quality "speech synth" ever, hell, it could even be the one that comes with windows. To make it worse, they put it in "whisper" mode, to make it sound um...evil I guess. After hearing this, there was absolutely no way I could even begin to take this album or band seriously. I mean, how fucking lazy do you have to be to not records your own vocals? There are a million effects out there these days that can make any schmuck sound fairly good, and there is absolutely no excuse for using a poor quality speech synthesizer. And if you're wondering about the lyrical content of this project, well let me see if I can remember a song: "die, die die...die tonight". I'm not joking, that is just about the extent of the lyrical content in EVERY song.

The only redeeming thing on the entire album are the half decent samples and ebm synthline in track 7. Of course the vocals and looping absolutely kill it, so it's not even worth checking out. Bottom line: avoid this album at any cost. I'm sorry that you even had to read this review.

-[.d4n b4rr3tt.]