I took a challenge that from June 28 to September 3 I would listen to and write about at least one new album daily. It's day 7 of that challenge, and I wanted to spread my reviews out to the web a bit more. So I'll now be posting these reviews onto DSiPaint, a week after everywhere else. If you want to see these reviews a week earlier, you can go to socialcu.be (or, if I know you, my Facebook)

I also highly encourage album requests. I need at least 68 albums after all.



Day 2: Immersion by Pendulum (Album Choice: DoctorHax)

I don't know too much about these guys. They play electro-rock and had a few songs in the game Mungyodance, including a remix (correction after googling: Mash-up) of sorts of Daft Punk's most famous song, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. I also heard the song Another Planet in 2008 and liked it but never bothered looking up another song. So here we go.

It took me a while to hit play for some reason, like several hours. Orchestral, soundtrack-esque intro with chiptune. Not bad thus far, liking the next couple of tracks. 2.5 tracks in and I'm interrupted. Crap.

A little over 4 hours later and I continue where I left off, 3 minutes into track 3. Track 4 is dubstep, a genre I'm not exactly partial to (read: Skrillex makes me want to van Gogh my ears and his live shows are the most worthless crap I've ever seen 2 minutes of). The interesting vocals work though. Up to track 9 and everything seems pretty versatile. Some songs are fast DnB, some songs are electro house (The Island Part 1 reminds me a bit of Swedish House Mafia), some songs are electro-rock and some songs are godawful ear-chafing headache inducing Dubstep. The Island Part II in particular gives me a killer migraine, which sucks when Part 1 was pretty decent.

The 2 tracks after the aforementioned Part II aren't much better to be honest. These attempts at metal come off at best as a cheesy attempt at Nine Inch Nails-esque industrial. At worst, they're a step above I Set My Friends On Fire. The last few songs improve on that by a longshot (except perhaps Self Vs Self, Death Metal and DnB is an effing weird combination) and the last song ends with some nice water effects after all the DnB/Metal/Whatever else to pound in your ears.

There's a deluxe version which adds over 70 minutes of audio (along with almost 50 minutes of video). There really is no reason for that to exist especially when 12 out of 13 tracks are remixes, as this album is already a bit overlong in my opinion. If you were to cut out the less enjoyable dubstep/metal tracks, you'd trim about 20 minutes and be left with a much nicer package of great DnB/Electro House tracks. As it is, this is a 6 or 7 out of 10 solely due to the smatterings of crap between the good music.