Review Summary: Catchy, seductive, just like the 80s.
Nowadays, I can't help but hear more and more of the "music" that people call "dubstep". While I do admit that I don't mind this particular style of music, artists like Skrillex quite often impress, it's not the kind of music that I want to hear more-and-more of if I go to the club. Why? Largely I feel that this is because dubstep basically breaks down like this: random noise. Noise is good sometimes, rock 'n roll definitely ain't noise pollution, but random noise can sometimes hurt the ears because there's no natural rhythm to it. Thankfully there are still bands like Daft Punk around who can turn the genre of electronic music into something fresh, but it's always nice to hear of music that's both inspired by past artists and willing to be different.
"There's no stopping when you just begun." That's the mind set I got as soon as
Redline got itself started. Right from the start of the first track, also named
"Redline", it's hard to turn your attention away because it grabs it from you within a second of it's playtime. With the sound of a speeding car gaining in speed played throughout the background, imagining yourself behind the wheel is not a difficult task. From the very start,
Redline reveals itself to be an incredibly well-timed musical experience, balancing flashy-fast beats with the kind of focus it takes for one to drive at the fastest speed possible.
Largely, this album consists of electronic beats and rhythms that come together to form a song, that's the basic formula for this album and, thankfully, it largely works because it allows the listener to do something that today's music leaves little room for: fill-in-the-blanks. This, of course, doesn't mean that you can make the music up as you listen (that would be cool to see some day), but this does mean that the album allows listeners to have the rare opportunity to interpret the music any way they like; if you wanna imagine yourself behind the wheel of a car, you can take the experience anywhere you can imagine it going from there. Basically "there's no stopping when you just begun" is because there's no release until the track finally calls an end to it and
lets you walk away clean.
Once in a while, the album comes out with some vocals to put on display.
"Electric Groove" is a perfect example of this as the execution is masterful. Right from the start, the electronic beats and rhythms raise the atmospheric tension by a mile, reminiscent of the recent
"Tick of the Clock" track from the excellent 2011 film
Drive, which allows the vocals to smoothly come in with the creepy, yet seductive, lyrics:
"All night long I wait for you / I can't help but imagine / All the things we'll do / To an electric groove". The song is the best on the album and it comes in at the perfect time to inform the listener that the creativity doesn't stop when it's only just begun.
After hearing an album like this, I can't help but have a bias against today's electronic music genre; once again, especially when being compared to this. This, in my opinion, is art. This is a positively energizing, exciting, wonderful work of art that never lets up. With a track like
"Activation" to set an end to the album, you may not be able to help yourself when you finally decide to hit the replay button. After all, there's no stopping when you've only just begun.
