When willingly subjecting yourself to a negative experience, you expect your threshold to be flirted with. Whether or not it's logical to seek out pain, it's logical to want what you seek. And so something can be so insufficiently negative that it is not good: the hot sauce too dilute, the haunted house not terrifying enough, your dominatrix too soft. Now, the self titled
Blackfilm has been advertized as being a very unsettling album, borrowing from dark ambient and boasting brooding horror movie vibes. I dove in with these expectations, but was met with a reality that was offensively inoffensive. I mean sure, it can be argued that expectations and prerequisite knowledge should be discarded when critiquing something, because who's to say they were reasonable and accurate prospects in the first place? But in this case I wasn't even played, they just didn't deliver on what they sold. Blackfilm wrote some electronic music with live drums and superimposed it over the universal audio deck used for horror movies. I'm only half-joking, as it's akin to splicing 'ominous noise number 9' into a queued scene in the editing process, the film tape analogous to the musical waveform on the laptop screen.
Neither element, the brooding cinematics nor the actual electronic base, is consistently adequate, compromising a mediocre album that neither scratches the itch of pleasure nor pain. It continuously struggles with this net zero, not really going anywhere. It never indulges on either side of the coin enough to warrant its purpose. The track “Stalingrad” is a perfect example of this, with its patched on horror sounds stapled to a barely competent downtempo beat. It's indicative of a need to give more weight to the core sound of the record; a classic example of an employed gimmick. Frustrating, really, when a song like “Sonar” actually fucks around with a synth line that alone borrows from
both the styles that the album is tinkering with, the dark and the staple electronic, accompanied by a complimenting drum loop. It makes you realize how spliced, tapped and glued most of the other tracks feel in comparison. Mahabharta sports a guest vocalist who actually elevates the sounds around her, further supporting how the rest of the album is an otherwise empty shell. And “Atlantiked” ends the album on a underbaked climax that could have compounded its tension much more powerfully, especially after it fights its way through four minutes of unnecessary ambiance. I get the point, I really do, but the issue comes from the execution. The pieces are there, but never fleshed out.
Blackfilm is an internally conflicted record that never finds its foothold, and offers a small few choice cuts that serve only to dwarf the album as a whole.
