Combichrist – Everybody Hates You

I wasn't a huge fan of this album when I first heard it, but after a few listens, it grows on you. Throw in seeing some of it live, and you start to really enjoy it. Get ahold of the deluxe edition, and it's amazing.

This is a typical, sickly and utterly irritating example of so-called EBM music for the 21st century someone additionaly adding insult to injury calling it 'Future Pop' or presenting it (god forbid!) with Industrial pretenses - with Combichrist in particular sticking more to their image than their music - which is, if we'll put it frankly a miserable clone of already out-there clone copycats that capitalize on 80s' EBM standards for a whole decade now - mostly those of Front 242 or Nitzer Ebb's. Combichrist certainly do have a moment or two worth giving your body a chance to twitch but there is no materia that will hold it all together, just spineless aims at life's dark matters which seem a ridicule pose - somewhere between dance music's worst and EBM's attempts resulting in some trancy ultra-dance power hybrid. Combichrist is more an apocalyptic version of DJ Bobo, Masterboy or Scooter than some true alternative force for the new age.

Some might say this album is pointlessly long. But if you listen to both discs from beginning to end, you see variation within the release. CombiChrist covers several genres here, beginning with hard, aggressive electro/ebm, and then slowly combining noise elements by the end of the first disc. The beginning of the second cd starts with rhythmic noise tracks, and ends with long ambient industrial songs.

A good aspect of Everybody Hates You is that not every track has vocals. As seen with Icon of Coil, Andy LaPlegua isn't the best when it comes to writing english lyrics. Thus it is welcomed that some tracks just use sampling, or those hilariously cheesy Windows text readers, in place of vocals.

Overall, this is a solid release in the end, though not really deserving of 5 out of 5. The variation in style reminds me somewhat of Noisex's monster, Ignarrogance, in the fact that it almost acts as a compilation of material.