During the first couple of minutes of 'Society of the Spectacle', I find myself wondering I was going to have to reconsider my position on South Central after the kicking I gave 'The Day I Die', the lead single from the album. The chugging synth bass and solid beats that kick off the first track, 'Nu Control' is briefly promising. Another couple of minutes later, and I'm confident I was right in the first place as it slips into slick robotic dance monotony, and it's all downhill from there.
The trouble is, anything super-contemporary, at the forefront of cutting-edge is more likely to date badly than that which isn't. Merging dance and rock was majorly innovative not so long ago. Now everyone's at it, and it's become, well, pretty standard. And so it is with 'Society of the Spectacle'. It simply doesn't offer anything new within the context of a genre that while it may have been clever conceptually, never really sounded that good in the first place.
A lack of innovation might be forgivable if they had the songs or some other compensation, but 'Society of the Spectacle' has got nothing, and sounds plain formulaic, with obvious song structures and pumpin' dance grooves constructed using sounds that have been done to death in the last decade. The lyrical paucity really doesn't help either. Most of the songs are built around a single verse repeated endlessly, and after the thousandth time the line 'I am bionic, bionic / I am bionic, bionic / An alcoholic drug addict' had been spun out in that cheesy, overused processed tone, I was ready to snap the sodding CD in half. And that's only the third track.
It's not that I can't deal with repetition: hell, I think 'Slates' by The Fall is an all-time classic, and it bludgeons away at two chords for seven minutes or whatever. But there has to be something behind the repetition, or something else interesting going on, a building tension or, well, anything. The unrelenting monotony of the mindless repetition of the music and lyrics here simply makes me tense. 'S.O.S' is simply a mess, and by the time we reach 'Paris in the Twentieth Century' the shuddery synth sounds and autotuned vocals just sound tired. Even electro-guru Gary Numan can't salvage this abomination, and 'Crawl', the track he features on, is little more than a shoddy NIN-by-numbers hash of a 'song'. A Place to Bury Strangers, too, ought to be feeling pretty embarrassed, featuring as they do on closer 'The Moth'. Sure, it's the best track on the album by miles, but then, that's not really saying much.
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Ultimately, 'Society of the Spectacle' sounds just so painfully obvious, yet at the same time, from the overly 'conceptual' artwork to the bland sloganeering, South Central come on like they're just trying too hard to be 'edgy' and mix things up but end up just appearing corny. They even use trap-on keyboards while wearing hoodies. It's like they're trying to making a statement without having anything to say, and being 'mysterious' without having anything behind the enigmatic front. The simple fact is that one band sounding like Pendulum is one too many. We certainly don't need a tribute act.
South Central on MySpace
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