Need a Magma fix?Five Suns adds the hardcore/noise elements of The Flying Luttenbachers and the thick, ominous keyboards of NeBeLNeST to a fundamentally Magma-esque zeuhl foundation. This is dark, heavy, loud stuff: more often than not the band is coming at you full force, with thunderous, repetitive bass and lots of tellingly familiar Rhodes. Take Magma circa "De Futura", crank up the distortion and the volume, take out the funk, and there you have it: your craving is satisfied.
Five Suns is so well-executed, particularly its five-part title track, that really the biggest problem with it is that, if anything, the band gets a little too close to its goal - a goal which may or may not be consciously stated - to imitate Magma as effectively as possible. My favorite part of the album is the opening track, which starts off disjointedly and slowly coalesces into a jarringly aggressive wall of noise (the band sounds most like The Flying Luttenbachers here) that promptly disintegrates into chaos, as if the recording equipment began eating itself from the inside out. From there on out, it's "De Futura Part 2" - hardly a criticism coming from me, of course, but still.
"Five Suns" is followed by a couple of shorter compositions, the first of which fails to make an impression on me, but the second of which is a nice, relatively relaxed closing movement that proves a good way to close out a rather cathartic album. I might criticize Five Suns for wearing its influences on its sleeve (or rather, taping them to its forehead), but I enjoyed it so much that the point is pretty much moot. You won't find anything unexpected here, but then, that's part of the charm.
review by Brandon Wu — 1-25-04 —
