(Constellation)

www.cst.com

We live in a strange audio world when an album by the Dead Science is boring.  Not that the trio isn't trying hard on their new album, Villianaire.  After all, there are ample shifting textures and broken beats, guitar blurts and strangely garbled rhythms.  Nonetheless, the end result is something less interesting than one might expect and I suspect that this has much more to do with our culture than with the band itself.  The postmodern / post-rock / art-rock nexus that the Dead Science pulls its bread and butter from is aging and the originality that first exploded out of the No Wave movement (and then developed and expanded into the myriad subgenres that populate indie record stores today) has lost much of its momentum.

One of the problems here rests in Sam Mickens' vocals, which are unrelentingly similar in texture and timbre throughout this album, so much so that it ultimately evokes more Natalie Merchant than, say, Björk.  The two comparisons here are apt because what Mickens seems to be striving for here is something of Björk's sense of anti-melody, but what he is actually achieving is Merchant's sameness in character, a sameness that is replicated from song to song, ultimately resulting in an overall effect that tends to bore rather than excite.

Standout Tracks: "Throne of Blood (The Jump Off)," "Wife You" CHRISTIAN KIEFER