Band: Xaos

Album: apokalupsis

Year: 2006

Label: self released

Genre(s): Old-School Industrial

Webpage: www.xoas.ca

Rating: 6/10

Tracklist:

1. Eschaton

2. Happy New Year

3. Empire

4. Chemognosis

5. Hymn Null (v2.449)

6. Gebarmutterkot

7. Sick

8. Everything Ends

            Hmm…I honestly don’t have much feeling toward this release. It is very bleak and depressing and perhaps has temporarily killed my ability to feel.

            The opening track “Eschaton” is one of my favorites on this album, but I feel like it gives the wrong impression of what is to come. Eschaton is a harsh, somewhat Skinny Puppy-esque ordeal; it’s got nice minimal use of synths and guitars. The vocals are turned down too low, but they add to the creepy atmosphere. It’s got a nice mid-tempo that you can groove to. I kind of expected or maybe hoped that this album would be fast and destructive, but…it really isn’t at all. Most of the tracks are actually the opposite: quite slow and thick, dragging the listener along through mud and swamp, through the empty fields of a dead world. It’s not bad, but it’s a bit different that I was anticipating.

            The album is fairly well crafted, the atmosphere is genuinely bleak, and the depression felt during and after listening to this record is not a fabrication. The sounds Xaos uses here all fit together; I never find myself proclaiming that anything sounds out of place. Unfortunately I just find the whole thing a bit too minimalist for my liking. I wish the production was a little bit better; occasionally things just sound too muddy and the guitars are too weak and hollow. I really like the sound of the vocals, but they are always turned down too low in the mix. The lyrics for this album are great, and I’m quite glad they were printed in the booklet. First off, from the way they are written in the booklet (no formatting or punctuation) their surrealist/nonsensical aspect reminded me again of Skinny Puppy, but then when you listen in the songs you realize that they all have a very strong structure and actually rhyme and are not just random strange words and phrases, but they actually make sense. I just wish they were more forward in the mix so that the lyrical quality of this album could be enjoyed to a greater extent. I would have liked to hear some parts of the songs break down and be left with just the vocal track and maybe one or two other subtle melodies.

My biggest gripe with the album is that, while each song definitely has its own persona and its own sound, each song sounds pretty much the same for its entire duration. The songs open with either a collection of depressing notes and a beat, or a beat, guitars, some vocals and maybe a synth, and it will more or less remain that same beat for the entire song. There will be a few subtle changes: the vocals might stop for a couple of measures, the guitars will hold a note; but never anything drastic or lasting that would cause the song to change direction at all. The song’s are all good, there are none I would skip while listening to the cd, but for each of them after 2 minutes or so of listening, I feel myself getting bored with it and wishing futility for a new section that will never come.

            The bottom line is that this album is good, but just too boring. The songs just are not as developed as I would like to hear them be. Many of them are only around three minutes in length, and I think Xaos would do well to allow more time for the songs to change and mutate and become something totally different than when it began. I would also like to hear the use of more instruments or at least more sounds per song.  I understand wanting a song to convey a certain feeling or atmosphere, but repetition can only do so much; it is important to provide diversity so the listener will want to continue on the path of that feeling and to hear it out until its finale. I would like to hear more in your face destruction tracks with higher BPMs, but maybe thats not what Xaos does. I would really like to hear Xaos dabble strongly in other genres, namely dark or ritualistic ambient and maybe even spoken word. This album (or the next one) could be very enticing if elements of other genres are allowed to brood in the mix: copulating and swelling into an abhorrent mix far more commanding than a single dark genre. I find that Xaos has an affinity for making very dark and very atmospheric music, and I can only hope that they continue progressing with their sound and keep trying to develop a strong identity for their music, and if these criteria are fulfilled, then I believe that Xaos definitely could be a band to watch for in days to come as our planet falls deeper into ruin.

-nov/Dec 2006    by [.d4n b4rr3tt.]