Illuminate - Augen Blicke

From the first shivering seconds I think of vampire Goths. Why? This is like vampire metal where the drums have been replaced with soft electronically beats and piano melodies. In the same time it sounds like soft electro and it's quite nice to listen to. The big drawback is that I still got this vampire thing in my mind all the time while listening to Illuminate.

This music fits well into gothic clubs and I suppose that's the artist's intentions. Still I got this feeling that the music isn't really finished. Something is missing and I've got difficulties on pointing out what.

The best song on this record is "Am Ufer", except for that one the rest of the songs sounds a bit flat, but I like "Abschied" also because of the more melancholic synthpop sound.

German vampire electro maybe never gets better than this, I don't know. Each element alone works well, the singing is great, the guitar is great, the synth is great, it's just the combination of all these that's not just that great.

This review was written 2004 and initially published on Neurozine.com Jan 01 2004