SKULLGRID

The hype around this band after releasing Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning left an impressive weight of expectation of their shoulders for their first full length effort. Skullgrid was then released and was left wondering if the band even tried on this. Despite consisting of the same sound and essentially all the same elements as the previously mentioned EP, Skullgrid fails to capture any of the magic that the band had led us to believe they could produce. I'm stunned by how similar these two releases are on the surface while being so different at their heart.

When I listen to Skullgrid I would not be surprised if the writing process went like this. Hey you know all those great 15 second ideas that we wanted to work into N-NCS but couldn't? Lets just string all of them together, call it an album, and arbitrarily break the long string up into sections we'll call songs. There's lots of cool little parts strung together here that sound great, but they seem pointless. There's no central cohesion, no theme pinning all of the random ideas together within a particular song. Unfortunately, this is the crux upon which their style rests and they will never recapture their previous success without this cohesion. The genius of the work is lost and due to how random the work appears, I'm left very cold by it.

We have here the highest caliber of musicianship, great original writing, fantastic energy, but yet the whole thing fails. Fans of the genre who just want to hear stunning pyrotechnics and rapid tempo-changes will get just what they're looking for in this. However, I feel most people who enjoyed their EP, especially those who don't venture into this genre often, will be very disappointed.