Album: Night Of The Brain - Wear This World Out (Station 55)

When Super_Collider went their separate ways, who would have guessed at the different career paths both Jamie Lidell and Cristian Vogel would take. Whilst Lidell always fancied himself as a closet funkateer, no-one could have foreseen Vogel's abandonment of body music entirely with his Night Of The Brain project.

Quite what possessed Vogel to form a bog-standard, faintly experimental art-rock band is unclear, but it's obvious that this is a style that doesn't exactly fit him like the proverbial glove. It's hard to see any traces of the man who released all those fine techno records on Tresor and NovaMute here, even if there is a fair dollop of incongruous electronics invading the Sonic Youth-esque squall. In fact, he's made recent references to abandoning the "banal and stagnant" techno scene altogether. If he thinks that this kind of music is the way forward then he's sorely mistaken.

Not that rock 'n' roll is dead or anything, far from it, but this is indistinguishable from any amount of alt-rock bands unafraid to dip an occasional toe into the dance music sphere. The lyrics are witless, melodies forgettable and any points of interest that arise out of the liberal use of programmed beats are undersold by the general hackery of everything else going on. 'Connecting Changes' in particular is a good idea ruined by laughable epithets like "Like when my dog died. Woof! A picture of him chasing his tail up the old tree" (?!).

You could call this a missed opportunity if you're feeling generous, but it's an avenue that Vogel really shouldn't have bothered venturing down in the first place. Brain-dead and almost completely devoid of any redeeming features, something tells me that Wear This World Out won't have quite the impact that Lidell's Multiply has.

http://www.highvoltage.org.uk/displaydemoreview.asp?num=2747&band=1785