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Review: 'Birthday Massacre, The'
'Imagica'   

-  Album: 'Imagica' -  Label: 'Metropolis Records'
-  Genre: 'Punk/New Wave' -  Release Date: '22nd July 2016'

Our Rating:
Ah, the four-track portastudio. Another piece of technology the digital age has eradicated. I still have a Fostex XR5 four-track tucked in a cupboard in the corner of my office. The trouble is, it runs the tape as double speed, which makes for better quality recording, but the majority of the stuff I recorded between 1992 and 1997 was done on the X26 I had before it which runs at standard speed, meaning I have no means of playing / mixing down the material on the pile of C90s sitting on a shelf. Perhaps it’s for the best. The good news is that The Birthday Massacre had the means to dust down their old demos from around 20 year ago and get over their trepidation about sharing their early demo recordings with the world at large.

Imagica was The Birthday Massacre’s original name, and the eleven tracks featured here were recorded between 1998 and 2001, prior to the change of name in 2002. As such, the recordings are a document of songs in their developmental stages, recorded by a band in their developmental stages. Several of the tracks have previously seen the light of day, having featured on the 7-track demo CD circulated in 2000 – but with just 40 numbered copies produced, it’s unlikely you’ll have heard the early versions of ‘Over’ and ‘The Birthday Massacre’ (from which they took their name and subsequently released under the title ‘Happy Birthday’ on their 2001 debut Nothing & Nowhere. ‘Play Dead’ would late surface on second LP, Violet.

Drum-machine based goth music lends itself well to four-track recording, and while Imagica / The Birthday Massacre are a turn of the millennium / post-millennium band, the sound and feel of the songs here owe far more to the mid-80s goth sound than anything contemporaneous in either the goth scene (by which time had morphed into darkwave with offshoots like cybergoth, industrial goth, and goth metal all moving away from the post-punk origins of the ‘movement’) or the new wave of acts like Evanescence who were breaking through. So, partly on account of the style, the songs come across well and sond remarkably polished

‘Night Time’ leans a shade on Visage’s ‘Fade to Grey’ and exhibits a more overtly electro sound, a pulsating synth bass melded to thumping disco beat and overlaid with glacial synths while the overdriven guitars are relatively muted and reserved for the chorus. It’s perhaps the most ‘of its time’ track on the album.

The band had started out playing covers (‘for fun’ as Wikipedia helpfully notes) and a number of these featured on the first CD and are featured here.
The cover of Madonna’s ‘Open Your Heart’ is faithful to the original and largely uninspired on many levels, not least of all that it fits the standard mould of ‘guitar band with synth plays rocked-up version of a pop song’ Their take on Faith No More’s ‘From Out of Nowhere’ is faster than the original and while doing little to alter it fundamentally, has a good energy and enough of The Birthday Massacre’s personality and style to ‘make it their own’ as they say on ‘The Voice’ and ‘X-Factor’.

The grinding sludge bass buzz of ‘Dead’ reveals another side of the band. More reminiscent of early Jesus and Mary Chain, a fiery post-punk / no-wave nihilism snarls through splintering guitars and heavy-duty drums.

Fans will no doubt be thrilled to finally get their hands on, and their ears round, these tracks, and rightly so. They’re good, both musically and in terms of the sound, particularly considering their age and origins. Personally, I rather like the immediacy of these recordings, and would probably pick ‘Imagica’ over their last studio album, ‘Superstition’.

The Birthday Massacre Online


  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Birthday Massacre, The - Imagica