Hypnoz - A Score for Iron Blues

I am convinced, without any concern, that every music style, nevermind if it is industrial or metal is a mirror of the specific geographical area's occasions and historical perspectives. That's why I always try to keep an eye on the projects which take their roots in cold and distant lands of mother Russia . Due to the country's history , many of them have an unique and independent sound. One of the flagships of Russian industrial scene is a label under the name Zhelezobeton, which presents us the latest CD from Hypnoz.

The man behind this project is Dmitriy Zubov, the well-known resident from Moscow suburbs. During his long music career he cross-referenced with lots of local scene comrades like Staruha Mha for example, but Hypnoz stays in his own expressions of the surrounding world for many years.

What can be heard on his last album 'A Score for Iron Blues' is an example of what is called "homemade" industrial and that throws me back 20-25 years in time. The main instrument, that Dmitriy uses in order to kick my brain, is a bass-guitar, which sound is distorted in different ways and principles, put into something that can be described as some kind of melodies. But what is good on Nadja's CDs here stays wet and uncompleted. The feeling is that the drones, tortured out from the guitar, are not connected to the general ambiance and just fight with it to control the space.

With the track "Believe" I tried it 3 times in a row to find something that touched my soul, but now I ask myself why I raped my ears for so long! The same is with the track "Night on Earth" where I was totally bored by the story that was accompanied by dark ambient melodies . Why do this world need it at all? In posed-out severity I see only the lack of creativity. Even though I understood the chants in Russian on "Good Angels", the purpose of it is still covered in shadows for me.

As minutes of time wasting passing by, I begin to digest that if the guitar doesn't try to rule the overall process and stays behind the curtain of the message, like on "Boat in a Fog", the music becomes more or less listenable. But this brilliant idea strikes me too late and after 44 minutes of phlegmatic strings jerking the only emotion that was left is called "eternal boredom". Jul 19 2011