Band: Akron

Album: Origin of the 7 Deadly Sins

Album Year: 2007

Label: hypervoxx

Genre(s): electronica

Band Website: www.akron-sound.com

Rating: 3.5/10

Here we have another new release from the infamous Hypervoxx label. This time we have some sort of pseudo epic trance posing as industrial, and its name is Akron. It bears the same typical low quality Hypervoxx brand outfitting, and once again from the way the cd art is laid out, I thought I was about to listen to a rap album. The song titles are about as generic as they get, and I really can't say I expected much from this record from the get-go. If you somehow come into possession of this album, I suggest you don't even bother opening the booklet; you will be greeted with a bunch of really nonsensical and frankly stupid psuedo equations using the names of some of the seven deadly sins. What this crap is supposed to mean is way beyond me, but it comes off as being simply ridiculous and completely trite. Avoid this so you may keep some respect for this band.

Anyway, on to the music. I'm not sure why this was sent to me, as it contains few, if any, elements of industrial musick. I find that it sounds more like an attempt at epic trance, using lots of grandiose bright choral pads to give it an atmosphere of being inside a big happy cathedral with bright flowers everywhere. Unfortunately, the music neither succeeds in being particularly epic or trance-y. The songs are all quite short, usually less than four and a half minutes, so there is no time to create and/or sustain a long epic track. The sound quality is fairly good, with good levels and production, but that is about where the good qualities end. The music itself isn't bad, but it fails to go anywhere or have any purpose for existing. The album is titled "the origin of the seven deadly sings", but the music does not sound anywhere even remotely close to what that titles implies. Every track is happy and upbeat, which to me is quite removed from the deadly sins. Just about every song is exactly the same; a combination of very similar choral pads and somewhat trance-y lead synths, with a very simple beat. The pads and the synths sound thick and nice, but the drums are extremely weak and sound counterproductive to where the synths are trying to take the songs. Unfortunately, there are no vocals on the entire album and I feel like this is a huge mistake by Akron. The music isn't terrible, but it is absolutely not interesting or dynamic enough to carry itself without the aid of powerful vocals and lyrics. With some really good vocals, Akron might have had a chance, but as it is I found this album boring and uninspiring.

Every song comes off as a trance piece that never really gets going. They start synth lines and pieces of melody, but fail to flesh them out and let them develop and progress over the course of the song. Instead, they just repeat loops of a couple mediocre synth lines and transition into another melody before the first has time to go anywhere and then back into the first one. This technique gets quite boring very quickly. The sounds themselves are promising, but unfortunately Akrons songwriting ability is weak and underdeveloped.

The bottom line is that Akron seems to have a penchant for making almost epic stuff, but they really need to sit down and realize what being epic is about and focus on writing good solid compositions that can hold a listeners attention and take them on some kind of an aural journey.  I think that they have real potential, but they fail to show it here which is quite unfortunate. They need more solid ideas to work from, not just rehashing the same basic idea for every track.

-[.d4n b4rr3tt.]

february 2007