Review Summary: you wouldn’t expect your discharged human feces to sing to you.
It was going to be a great album, I could feel it. The album cover was simple yet disturbing enough that it piqued my interest. It seemed to hint at a more sinister side of Aesthetic Perfection, and I wasn’t complaining. I was nearly celebrating, expecting one of the better industrial albums of the year! But then I listened to the album.
All Beauty Destroyed stinks of utter failure, and holds utter crap in its wake (like a tidal wave of excrement). If you had never listened to Aesthetic Perfection before this album, you might think that Daniel Graves wouldn’t know a good idea even if it stood right in front of him, took its clothes off, and demanded to have sex.
A Violent Emotion was a good idea, with its catchy version of aggrotech and enough room for the music to breathe.
All Beauty Destroyed, however, is completely void of good ideas. It’s just one bad idea wrapped up nicely, with a neat little bow on top. Don’t let the packaging deceive you.
An aggrotech effort once driven by violent anger is now creating club ready, appeals-to-the-lowest-common-denominator songs with boring synths and excruciating repetition. To be fair, it could have worked, but Aesthetic Perfection is not cut out for this sound. By pairing simplistic, quieter synths with bland beats and pleasant singing (if you can call it pleasant), Aesthetic Perfection has essentially created a dance album. There’s one problem though - it’s boring. The only thing saving this album from being completely average is Daniel’s screams, yet even those are lackluster now (it sounds like he replaced his vocal chords with a frog’s). Add on to this misery many emotionless attempts at singing, and you get the picture. This is how you sell out, my friends. Forget about musical relevance and make stuff as average and unobtrusive as possible to sell albums.
“Now hold on a second”, says the reader, “Surely there must be some redeeming factors to the music!” “Well sure there are”, I say, “The beats and vocal lines can sometimes be catchy.” Or at least that’s what was meant to happen until Daniel decided to turn down any semblance of past punch. Some good choruses would have helped too, or at least some well-written lyrics, but I guess we can’t even have those. I leave you with some of the lyrics from ‘A Nice Place To Rest’:
I know,
That you want me,
I know,
That you love me,
And I hope,
When you touch me,
That you know you touch damnation.
