MissSuicide - Villain

You might currently be thinking to yourself as you stare at the cover art for this album is, “Why is this person copying Heath Ledger’s makeup from The Dark Knight?” Well, at least that’s what I thought and that’s completely unrelated to everything this review is going to be about. Regardless, that is not the late and great Heath Ledger but a German dark electro / industrial project by the name of MissSuicide who has just released their EP “Villain”. Released, mixed, mastered, and produced by the artist themselves, “Villain” is a testament to DIY to mixed results. 

The first song is a prologue titled ‘Hidden Sound’. And it’s nothing great if I’m being honest. I suppose MIssSuicide was going for a cinematic sort of setup for the EP as xylophones and German dialogue plays over ambiance. There’s even room for a bit of dubstep as the intro track opens up but that’s all this song ever really turns out to be; nothing more than a three-minute and fort-some second opener that lasted a bit too long and probably should have only been a minute or two before dying down. 

The second track, ‘Me, Myself & MissSuicide’ gets the ball rolling right off the bat with a fast and frenetic dark electro beat but it’s nothing completely unique. There’s some dubstep elements echoing the intro which gives it a nice coating of paint, but it’s still fairly simple dark electro at the end of the day. The little piano touch at the end of the song doesn’t exactly save it and isn’t the most fantastic use of the instrument. The song falls flat. 

And speaking of Jokers, ‘Halfway Across’ begins with a sample from the animated version of the classic Batman story The Killing Joke voiced by none other than Mark Hamill. I do think that making the first minute of your song a sample with a bit of background music is a bit cheap, however. Following that we flow right into a dark electro dance beat that doesn’t quite fit the thematic ending of that animated film at all. Again, by the numbers dark electro, four-on-the-floor dance beats. It’s okay, but nothing special. 

‘Pale Moonlight Dance’ ran with a few sounds that fit in with gabber without ever becoming hardcore enough to become strictly aligned with that genre. ‘Seil, Schaufel, Loch’ sounds like a demo that wasn’t ready to be released, as if everything in the song is muffled and wasn’t mixed properly. This became an immediate pass on replays of the EP. 

‘Code Red’, which serves as the epilogue of the EP, is the only track that gave me a bit of a rush. Perhaps it was the synth arrangement that got me, or the ever-heightened presence of what can be interpreted as an alarm being brought into a song, that got me going. A bit of darksynth influence, perhaps, can be found on the track. 

Out of six songs on the EP I found one of them to be to my taste, but not to the point where I would include it on a personal playlist. This is a boring EP, to say the very least; predictable and jam packed with way too many samples that take up good chunks of songs. The most notable being that of ‘Halfway Across’; one minute of movie dialogue with your own score. Again, that’s cheap. I don’t really have many words to say about how this can be fixed, except that it’s time to go back to the drawing board and see what else you can come up with.