A7ie - Tabula Rasa

First of all I just want to state, that I used to be a fan of the so called harsh-electro movement. Suicide Commando has always been my inspiration, early Amduscia was a fun harsh-eurodance to listen to (catchy melodies) and Aslan Faction was one of the most dark music I've heard. But to be honest after a while most of this got really... REALLY boring. The trance or even goa-trance influences were introduced into the dark / harsh reality and we had massive outburst of mediocre projects offering a nonstop 4x4 heavy pounding beat with some minor glitches here and scratches there... The only thing that made you distinguish one band from another, was the equalization on the over distorted black-metal vocals. Thankfully there are still projects around, that do not put the bassdrum on top in their production process. There are still bands that prefer the atmosphere over tempo. A7IE is one of those bands.

Tabula Rasa is the third album of the French project A7IE (Asepie). Released by Advoxya Records it comes in three different versions: digital, a standard CD and a limited edition CD with bonus disc full of remixes. The album itself comes with 11 songs + a hidden bonus. The album flows very well. All the songs have a great feeling of the oldschool dark / harsh electro in veins of the beforementioned Aslan Faction or older Suicide Commando. I guess that is why I didn't throw the mp3s out after listening to it one time. While I'm not a big fan of over distorted vocals, they work quite well here. Their timbre don't hurt my ears but I still couldn't get what the songs were about, which is a shame because judging from the song titles, this isn't another "fuck you" type of lyrics. While being on the subject of the words, it seems that this album has a contributor - Nick Quarm of Juggernaut Services (and our co-editor), who helped out on couple of the tracks. This makes it even more annoying not to understand what's it all about?

Most of the tracks here are mid-tempo (thankfully) which gives the listener "more time" to listen to the soundscapes and melodies which create a very dark atmosphere. For me, there is no hit song here. Actually I would go as far as to say there are no "songs" here at all so to speak. All the tracks somehow blend in one to another making the listener stay in the feeling even more.

The special bonus (hidden) track, that comes with the CD version of the album is a cover version of the :wumpscut: - Embryodead. Unfortunately the cover version is SO similar to the original that it's sometimes hard to realize this is actually a cover. Still... Embryodead being a very good song as it is, still stays good in this version.

Like I've stated before, the limited edition comes with a bonus CD with remixes. Those come from such fame acts as Xotox, Freakangel, ES23 or Cygnosic etc. I can't say if there's any remix that really stands out here... They're all ok but again I believe you wouldn't be able to gues who made the remix if you'd listen to the cd at random.

So. The only thing I have against this album is that it didn't came out in early 2000's. It would have been a massive album FOR ME back then. Today, unfortunately it's just a good album which brings back memories. I'm happy that there are still project that make music like this and I sure wish them all the best. Jun 04 2013