Mnemic - Passenger |
Published Jan. 19 2007
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Humanaut |
| Genre | Industrial Metal |
Guillaume Bideau
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Vocals
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| Tracks | 11 |
Mircea Gabriel Eftermie
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Guitar
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| Runningtime | 48 Min. |
Rune Stigart
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Guitar
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| Label | Nuclear Blast |
Tomas "Obeast" Koefod
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Bass
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| Release | 19 Jan. 2007 |
Brian Rasmussen
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Drums
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| Country | Denmark |
Mircea Gabriel Eftermie
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Keyboard
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| Similar artists | Fear Factory, Meshuggah | ||
In my eyes, Mnemic has been one of the most promising new metal bands on the scene for quite a while. Mechanical Spin Phenomena was an interesting debut, but it wasn't until the following The Audio Injected Soul that the band really found their niche. I hold that album as one of the absolute best of 2004, and I still go back to the song Deathbox on a regular basis to get my weekly dose of metal. That is why it hurts so much when it turns out that the third album Passenger is such a decline from the previous outings.
I should have seen it coming, though. When the charismatic singer Michael Bøgballe departed in 2005, the rest of Mnemic had trouble filling his spot. Tony Jelencovich (M.A.N.) stepped in for a while and then left, before the band finally decided on Guillaume Bideau, formerly of the French band Scarve. He's not awful by any means (coming off like a mix of Bøgballe and Corey Taylor of Slipknot) but lacks the power and versatillity that his predecessor had.
Bideau is not the biggest problem on board this flight, though. It seems that all the trouble with founding a vocalist has rubbed off on the song writing, because the difference between The Audio Injected Soul and Passenger is enormous. The choruses here are mostly of the lame kind with no bite at all, and the rest is just a noisy mess with no originalaty and strucutre whatsoever. The electronic elements that worked so well on the previous albums mostly sound tacked-on here, and Bideau unfortunately becomes more and more annoying the further the record spins.
Reedeming features are found on a small amount of songs, like the aggressive In The Nothingness Black and the emotional The Eye On Your Back, but they're absolutely no match for tracks like Ghost or Dreamstate Emergency. While this release does have some qualities, I'm still forced to bring you the mourning news that the year of 2007 begins with a colossal disappointment.
See
also review of: The
Audio Injected Soul
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Performance
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Originality
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Production
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Vocals
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Songwriting
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6 |
5 |
7 |
5 |
4 |
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Summary
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4 chalices of 10 - Niklas |
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