Mortal - Nu-En-Jin (CD) INDUSTRIAL

• New Factory Sealed CD
• Jewel Case

Description

 If you know Mortal, you're probably expecting something different from their comeback album, and you'd be right. This time around the band is reincarnated as a noise-intensive post-nuclear industrial dance act. "Nu-En-Jin" is all digital drums, ambient FX and heavily distorted, screaming vocals with the kind of futuristic cyberpunk lyrics you'd expect form such an album. Its grating, its catchy ... The songs come in three flavors - the aforementioned computer-apocalypse dance mixes, affairs that eschew all melody in favor of pure destructive energy, much quieter, ambient tunes which actually contain some muted, melodic(hypnotic) singing, and a couple of remixes off Lusis which work quite well in their new setting. Jyro and Jerome continue to prove interesting throughout their diverse artistic incarnations, and this album is no exception. The songs are interesting, if not to everybody's taste, but "Nu-En-Jin" really shines lyrically. The lyrics are stories set in the near-future or some alternate history, often ripped straight out of a video game or a Gibson novel, but they manage to overcome their inherent cliches to explore some deeper truths about people. They also bring me to my major complaint about the album - the artwork overlaying the lyrics makes for an incredibly frustrating read.