Zer...omancer.

[Zer_]

Zer hears Zeromancer, Zer likes Zeromancer

Zeromancer is an industrial rock band formed in 1999 by members of the band Seigman. Hailing from Norway, Zeromancer has become quite popular in Europe. They have remained somewhat unkown here in North America, but chances are, you may have heard at least one of their songs. Although they are classified as industrial rock, they have a very unique variety to them that keeps their music interesting from one album to the next. They do indeed maintain signature styles throughout their library, although, they kept their music fresh by adopting undertones and themes for each of their albums.

From one album to the next, they tend follow a subtle theme throughout the album. Of course they will usually include some very different sounding songs in each album, they maintain a consistent style to them. Some albums feature more drastic undertone changes than others, but they all set Zeromancer apart as great artists. At times these additional sub-genres are done in a very subtle, and clever way. Throughout their discography, we've seen pure industrial rock, synthpop, gothic, hard rock, and other various undertones. This results in a varied, and intereting discography that keeps you begging for more. With only a few songs in their library that I do not enjoy, I'd have to say that they are a band that has excellent songs throughout. They do tend to be consistently good, although it's not difficult to find more consistent groups. However, their good songs are very, very good by comparison. Zeromancer often takes on very vague lyrics that take some thought to understand. They usually tackle darker, twisted themes in a similar fashion to Marylin Manson for example.

Clone Your Lover

Zeromancer's debut album came out in the year 2000 in Europe. The album also won Zeromancer the award for the best newcomer of 2000 at the German Alternative Music Awards. A music video was created for the song Clone Your Lover. I enjoy this album quite a lot. My four top songs from the album being God Bless The Models, Flirt (With Me), Something For The Pain, and Houses of Cards from a grand total of ten songs. The album that introduced me to their excellent lyrical style. It's not amongst my personal great albums, but it sets a solid foundation from which Zeromancer improves their later library over the course of the decade.

Eurotrash

Zeromancer's second album takes on a more synthpop theme to supplement their industrial style. Unleashed upon the world in 2001, Eurotrash featured five songs that stand out as great songs (out of twelve in total). Doctor Online is the song that introduced me to the band, and got me interested, Eurotrash (Song of the same name as the album), Need You Like a Drug, Cupola, and Send Me an Angel stand out as my favorites of this album. Overall, Eurotrash improves upon Clone Your Lover, and sets itself apart as a great album. The track Send Me an Angel is in fact a cover of a popular Australian group Real Life, a hit from 1983. I prefer the cover song over the original by a wide margin.

Zzyzx

Zeromancer's third album, hailing to us from 2003, marks a more mellow entrance into their growing library. Many fans were caught off guard by the mellow shift, although it was generally a well recieved album. Five songs stand out as great songs in this one out of a total of ten . Teenage Recoil, Hollywood, Famous Last Words, Erotic Saints, and Mosquito Coil. Zzyzx was also the album that featured the more variation from one song to the next. Overall, it was largely considered a weak album release by the group. This does not change the fact that one of their most successful songs, Famous Last Words, was featured in the album. Famous Last Words was a song that reached some popularity in North America. Overall, the mellow songs featured in the album are a suprisingly good contrast to their harder works.

Sinners International

After nearly six years of silence, featuring a new programmer/keyboard player, Zeromancer came to us with Sinners International in 2009. Featuring five more greats out of a total ten. The tops being Doppelgänger I Love You (Also released as a single), My Little Tragedy, It Sounds Like Love (But it Looks Like Sex), Fictional, I'm Yours To Lose, and Ammonite. Another excellent addition to their library, Sinners International implements only slight changes to their style over their previous albums. In contrast to Zzyzx's very more drastic shift, this one was more subtle. It was, nevertheless, an excellent addition.

The Death of Romance

Zeromancer's fifth album came to us earlier in 2010. This marks one of two albums featuring very drastic changes in the aural styling. The Death of Romance keeps Zeromancer's signature industrial rock style, while adding a rather large dose of gothic styles. The combination may sound strange at first, yet upon listening to the album, we hear nothing but a fantastic piece of audio.
Before releasing the album, Zeromancer toured Europe to help build the hype towards the album by revealing a song to its eager fans. I do say this is my favorite overall album from the group. Five out of their total of ten tracks stand out as being simply brilliant. The first song in the album, Industrypeople hits you hard, followed by another heavy hitter, The Hate Alphabet. Three other songs stand out, Revengefuck, Mint, and V. I hold Mint as being a very different, yet brilliant song. Despite being long, and featuring only a few lyrics compared to the song's length, the lyrics hit hard, they are brilliant. This song never gets old for me.

Final Thoughts

Although Zeromancer may not be everyone's cup of tea, I truly feel that they are a very underrated group. They are amongst my favorites, and they take a very big chunk of my daily playlist. Explore their songs on youtube, and buy these albums. Now all we need is another North American tour.

 

[Zer_]

I will be posting more music reviews in the future. Expect a new post this week. I'll most likely be reviewing Celldweller and Blue Stahli. Both are different artists, but they will often work together on their songs.

 

[WhamBamSam]

In the future I'd recommend embedding youtube videos of noteworthy songs so that people who haven't heard the band/album before will be better equipped to assess the band for themselves and better understand the opinion that you are presenting. Most people reading your review will be too lazy to look up the music for themselves, and really it's your responsibility as the author to make things as convenient for your readers as possible.

 

[Zer_]

In the future I'd recommend embedding youtube videos of noteworthy songs so that people who haven't heard the band/album before will be better equipped to assess the band for themselves and better understand the opinion that you are presenting. Most people reading your review will be too lazy to look up the music for themselves, and really it's your responsibility as the author to make things as convenient for your readers as possible.

I considered it while writing up this post. I decided not to. I instead opted to give the better examples of their offerings. Providing with youtube links would just make my review redundant. I'd just have to say "This stuff rocks! Listen!"

 

[WhamBamSam]

I considered it while writing up this post. I decided not to. I instead opted to give the better examples of their offerings. Providing with youtube links would just make my review redundant. I'd just have to say "This stuff rocks! Listen!"

Eh, not really. Regardless of what you write, it's not going to have much of an impact on the reader's opinion of the music. In certain cases the review can make readers more open-minded about the music[footnote][user]Unabletothinkofname[/user]'s reviews are a great example of this. Even in cases where I've found the music outright unpleasant or suspected that I would dislike it prior to listening, his writing has made me give it more of a chance than I'd have done normally.[/footnote] but when it comes down to it they need to actually hear the music, and you might as well make it easy on them. Movies, video games and the like have somewhat similar problems with regard to reviews, but it's especially hard to guess at one's opinion on music just by reading about it. I can only think of one band description that I've read within the past year that has really made me think "wow I need to go check these guys out right now." Unless I'm a serious industrial fan, I'm not likely to take much of an interest in this band based solely on text, and in fact the only reason I ended up investigating Zeromancer at all is that I've now made two comments in your thread and feel that I should make some small comment on the work in question rather than just nitpick over your review style. What the review should do is draw my attention to various notable qualities in the music and provide opinions on the work for readers to discuss, and naturally, be entertaining to read. At any rate, it's good to have another music reviewer on these forums.

Anyhow, I youtubed a few songs off of the latest album ("Industrypeople," "V," and "Mint"), and unfortunately can't say that I have strong feelings one way or another. They seem a tad light for my tastes, and just don't really grab my attention. Not my thing, but not bad by any means.

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

Oh hey, that band name looks familiar... checks massive list... ah yes, they're one of those bands I stumbled across through Pandora (and enjoyed enough to put onto my massive and unwieldy list). Don't think I've heard their more recent work though, but now I'm sort of curious, so job well done I suppose. And Celldweller for the next go around? Won't catch me complaining about that, heh.

Movies, video games and the like have somewhat similar problems with regard to reviews, but it's especially hard to guess at one's opinion on music just by reading about it.

I'd like to echo/reinforce that sentiment - as an inherently aural medium, translating the experience of an album into text is an unwieldy and imprecise science at best. Without actually experiencing the songs in question for themselves, your audience has only whatever visual aids you utilize and how you describe it to base their reaction upon - this can be a problem if, for example, the band members all look like douchebags and you've included a large photograph of them. But assuming that isn't a stumbling block, you're still grappling with the medium of text - say you think an album is good, or another album is less good. Why?

What makes something awesome and something else mediocre? What do they actually sound like at all? If you describe a band's new more mellow direction on a later album, that's all well and good but it doesn't really tell someone who has never heard their earlier heavy sound very much. Likewise, breaking down lyrical content, riff progression, or the merits of the technical composition of the music itself is certainly more informative than just saying something is good or bad, but if you audience hasn't experienced the material you're discussing then they still don't have much of a baseline to apply your observations to.

Ultimately you have to listen to it - without doing that, it can be very hard to tell if I as a reader will agree with your verdict as a reviewer. If you do a good enough job of describing what a band/album sounds like, I'll probably have some idea if I even want to bother listening to them to find out if I agree with you or not, but I still won't know if I'm actually going to enjoy the music you're discussing.

It really boils down to your audience - are you writing for otherwise informed listeners who have a thorough grounding in the genre/band and just might not have formed an opinion on the latest album yet? In that case a text review might very well suffice, as those readers have a firm baseline in mind and can apply their experiences with previous albums/other bands in the genre/etc against what you're writing about in your review.

If you're writing reviews/retrospectives/what-have-yous for bands you're assuming your audience hasn't actually heard of though? Well ultimately isn't the goal there to convince them to listen to that band? You're going to have more luck doing that if you don't make those would-be listeners hunt for tracks themselves - you might very well have made them intrigued but your average netizen is super lazy:
[HEADING=3]Penning a review that boils down to an entreaty for them to listen to the band/album you've discussed, but providing no links or embedded tracks, is essentially the equivalent of assigning your audience with homework.[/HEADING]

I don't think it is really surprising to suggest that most readers are probably not going to do that 'homework' - you're already battling with countless other forms of input for their attention, you don't want to give them additional reasons to stop paying attention if the point is to convince them that they should be paying attention.

And that is why you should embed tracks into your reviews - knowledge is power!

 

[Zer_]

***Snip***

I probably will embed tracks into my Celldweller / Blue Stahli review. Although they have a much smaller library of music, therefore it will be very easy to get down and dirty with a few songs, describing in detail what I enjoyed and didn't enjoy.

I didn't go into much detail, and in retrospect I would've at least given one song in each album a greater deal of description. Consider, though, that I covered a decade worth of music from a single artist.

EDIT: Modified the review only slightly. A song from each album provided in place of the album covers. Enjoy.

 

[Rouse]

I remember the good old times when Clone Your Lover was in my playlist.... 6 times.
They seem to have changed a lot since then.