Review Summary: Pete Murray and Neil Godfrey try heading back to their roots. Key word: "try".
Nostalgia can be a powerful thing. Few people would deny the excitement that comes from hearing news about movie adaptations of old favourite TV shows. But it can also make us react to such things in ways we otherwise wouldn’t. This often happens in one of two extreme ways: either we become so blinded by nostalgia that we don’t notice when something is deeply wrong with the remake, or we remember the original so fondly that we lose our rag if we see any kind of aberration from it. Of course, no attempt to remake an older product is going to end up looking exactly like the original, especially if enough time has gone by that the creators’ minds have since moved away from that field and become better at other things, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing if the end product fails to deliver.
When Lo-Pro announced that their third album would have a heavier sound to it, many Ultraspank fans were overjoyed. After all, who needs meandering stadium rock when you can have relentless, high-tech industrial metal? But as someone who enjoyed Lo-Pro’s first two albums and was interested to see where they would go next, hearing them go back to that sound confused me. As good as Ultraspank’s two albums may have been, the impression I got from Lo-Pro (and their ‘acoustic’ project, Life on Planet 9) was that Pete Murray and Neil Godfrey would rather keep moving forward and trying new things out instead of looking to their past for inspiration. In fact, Murray is quoted as saying that the band didn’t intend to write their heaviest record yet, it just happened – which might explain why
Disintegration Effect falls flat so much of the time.
Disintegration Effect’s fatal flaw isn’t that it tries to be heavy; it’s that it never fully succeeds. You can almost sense Murray and Godfrey trying hard to reconnect with their roots, but years of focusing heavily on different genres seem to have made it hard to recapture all of the charm Ultraspank had. Much like Linkin Park’s
The Hunting Party, we’re left with something that promises to scratch all our itches, yet fails to stick in the memory as keenly as that which went before it. It’s as if Lo-Pro tried to combine their earlier sound with that of Ultraspank, resulting in an awkward hybrid of the two.
To his credit, Murray’s sung vocals are just as jaw-dropping as they have always been. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of his screams. I can understand if his unclean vocals aren’t as bright as they were 15 years earlier, and it’s obvious that he put a lot of passion into them, but they end up sounding forced on certain songs (looking at you, “Sheer Electronic”). On top of that, the songwriting doesn’t give his voice anywhere near as much chance to shine as it did on Ultraspank’s
Progress or any of Lo-Pro’s earlier albums, and when it does, it’s usually buried beneath several layers of poorly-produced B-grade alternative metal.
This makes it all the more frustrating that there
are moments of quality tucked away in the mire. “Dig In” sounds like a lot more time went into its creation compared to the other tracks, and proves that Murray and Godfrey can still write high-energy industrial-lite bangers akin to Ultraspank’s
Progress stand-out “Click”. “Give Me Life” and “We are the Ones” could almost pass for earlier Lo-Pro tracks if the murky production were improved and the latter’s rather unnecessary dubstep sounds were cut out. But for every track like these, there are a number of cuts like “Bow Down” and “Soulless” to remind me why this is a 2.
Fair play to Lo-Pro for doing what they want to do, and I suppose the fact that they’ve lost some popularity since the mid-2000s has given them more liberty to try out different things. But I can’t help thinking that had this album been thought through a little bit more, it might have turned out far better.
Disintegration Effect had the potential to be the return to heaviness that fans had waited years for, but the best it ends up sounding like is a rough demo.
