The Less You Freak

Once again, we find ourselves staring down the barrel of the BNE hype machine.

The release notes say that these guys “have been eating, breathing and sleeping music throughout their lives” and that working in the studio “gave rise to amazing, top notch produced music” and that everyone in the whole world says “that The Freak Show did exactly that – freaked everyone out!”

Your bullshit detector is already buzzing, I expect.

And halfway through the first track, it’s working overtime.

Once again this is simple, braindead, play it safe trance. Nothing to get excited about, unless you are the copyright holder of Dead Or Alive’s You Spin Me Round which is cynically and cheaply sampled on track three (questions@deadoralive.net and copyright@epicrecords.com would be good starting points.)

It should come as no surprise to you that this album is utter, utter dross. Each track is a virtual carboncopy of the last. There are no surprises, no standout tracks, barely even a well-crafted melody to get excited about.

The key problem here is the label’s hype machine kicking into overdrive again. Echotek, Basic, and now this – every time telling us that the “new style” of trance is here and that if we miss out on it, there must be something deeply wrong with us, and we’d best get our balls examined.

To the label: keep on dressing up mutton as lamb, keep pissing on our chips and telling us it’s vinegar, keep on telling us that we need to part with some hard-earned cash to ride the waves of whatever you tell us to. Sooner or later, people will realise you’re talking pure, blatant hype.

The more intelligent psytrance-buyers out there can already see that the emperor wears no clothes.

And one final point: while piracy is definitely guilty of harming the psytrance scene, shit like this cuts a hell of a lot deeper.