The performance on A Frames' latest couldbe called sloppy, except it follows an annoyingly predictable patternof basic and pounding rhythms and excessively dissonant melodies thatgo nowhere and barely change over the course of a song. Sullivan'svocals are bellowed out over this rather noisy cascade of sound likesome campy narration of a bad Frankensteinmovie and the result makes me want to flip straight through many ofthese already short and narrow songs. "Black Forest I" and "Experiment"aren't too bad in and of themselves; the first begins like a factorygetting ready to churn out the most evil and nasty of monsters and thesecond is an all-engines-firing burn that wheezes by in a haze ofstatic and bumping low-end frequencies, but Black Forest rarelyescalates into anything exciting beyond those tunes. Half way throughthe album (when the dull gray color of the entire album begins to showthrough most strongly) I'm ready to turn it off and by the end I'mtwiddling my thumbs waiting for something to happen that I didn't seecoming from two songs away. Over time certain songs become moretolerable, like "Galena" and "Death Train" or even "U-Boat," but in theend the whole package just sounds like an underperformed, cold, anddistant take on the basic formula of guitars, drums, and voices. samples:
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