Play With My Mind

When Melicia’s debut album Running Out Of Time dropped back in 2003, I was amazed. The production was so up-there, that it was a challenge to find anything to mix with it that didn’t sound shit going from the glassy to the muddy.

Then Melicia shuts up for three years, and we finally get a follow-up. Which is quite dreadful.

Melicia is a bloke – a lot of people, myself included, thought he was a chick judging by the name: a shrewd marketing trick that predated Psytropic’s infamous Psynina meme by a good couple of years. He has introduced a chick this time: Odelya Ilouz, who contributes some dreadful vocals, and even worse lyrics.

But what this album is really about is the ongoing migration of Israel’s psytrance kings toward the realm of eurotrance. On pretty much every track here, Melicia goes from formulaic, wavey fullon into Tiesto cliché. Every buildup has a snare roll, and most have those annoying escalating sirens.

Melicia’s production is, in general, good: there are effective sweeps and a compelling, exciting drive to the music. However, the samples are cheesy and sound dated, there’s too much repetition across the whole album, and the vocal tracks are an utter embarrassment. The title track, for instance, has a dreadful lyric that makes Michelle Adamson sound like Patti Smith, and the musical backbone is lazy, disinterested trance-by-numbers.

It really is that bad, but you may note that this review isn’t as full of bile and spew as some others from the brain of psyreviews. Which isn’t to say that this is a fairly good album.

It’s dross, but then dross released amid a backdrop of dross becomes average. This will probably sell, that’s not really the point. The casually-interested observer in you will find significance, of sorts, in this album as another stepping stone along whatever route Israeli trance is taking these days.