www.pitchshifter.com

The second full-length by British industrial outfit Pitchshifter after leaving the Godflesh-derived industrial metal sound behind is the strangely-titled www.pitchshifter.com. Like all albums from this era, it’s worse than the previous album, in this case Infotainment?, but superior to the following release, Deviant. However, this release, despite its flaws, still has its moments, and is a fairly enjoyable listen at times.

This release furthers the new aesthetic that Pitchshifter had first experimented with on Infotainment?. However, the new nu-metal/alternative rock style is more fully and comfortably consolidated with this release. The fairly experimental nature of the previous full-length has now been shed. A perhaps more noticeable change, however, is in the vocal style. This is the release on which Clayden would debut the fully-fledged version of the vocal style that he is now best-known for—it’s a clean vocal, but with a highly distinctive tone and an almost sardonic tone. This has entirely replaced the harsher roar featured previously. He does vary his style considerably within the fairly tight constraints afforded by the chosen technique, and it’s rarely boring. It can be slightly grating at times, however. The lyrics are not too great, but they do place a reasonably heavy emphasis on alliteration, and his enunciation can be fairly unorthodox too, which means that if you don’t listen too carefully to exactly what he is saying, but instead dwell on how it sounds, the effect is still quite entertaining.

This release still retains several of the elements that made the previous album so noteworthy. Perhaps the most notable is the percussion. This album has discarded the use of real drums entirely, preferring to focus on programmed percussion only. Stylistically it takes a lot of influence from the more hardcore electronic styles, notable the bass and drum types. The most noticeable element is the snare drum, which produces the insane, hyper-speed spastic work featured on Infotainment?. As with that release, the combination of this drum style and heavy guitars is both startling and exciting. This juxtaposition is most highlighted in tracks like W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G. which features some really beautiful rolling drum lines, making the sound that bit more exciting.

The use of sampling has been very firmly established in this release. It’s used in a rather different manner to the previous release, however. Indeed, a casual listen will only reveal a handful of obvious incidences of sampling. However, this release, again as per Infotainment?, features a track of samples used at the end… It’s obviously not a track that is intended to be listened to as part of the album, being intended as an aid to samplers, but it is quite revealing because some of the sounds that have been sampled are quite remarkable. They’re all worked into the music in such a way that you wouldn’t even realise they were sampled without having heard the free samples track. Rather than obvious things like vocal bits, they’re mainly instrumental sounds and electronic noises. As it turns out, some of the more notable moments have been generated thus.

This is the first Pitchshifter release on which the songwriting has been noticeably disimproved. The band does seem to be trying—most of the songs are still structured quite carefully, and there are some very well thought-out build-ups and constructions. However, the riffs just aren’t there, for the most part. The last traces of metal and the high levels of aggression seen in the previous release are gone. The result is that the riffs are predominantly based on rock or nu-metal; the latter, in particular, not being particularly known for its dynamic riffing style. The result is that try as the band might, there’s just no saving some of the tracks.

There are still some excellent songs, mainly focussed in the first half of the album. Unfortunately, this is where the filler has really become a part of Pitchshifter’s work. Essentially the whole second half is verging on bland and contains few interesting ideas. The really memorable tracks—Genius, Subject to Status, W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G., et al., are all placed in the first half, making it quite difficult to sit the entire album out. It’s rather poorly-paced as a whole. The fairly funky-sounding bass and dynamic percussion really aren’t sufficient to save the less interesting songs from mediocrity, since the guitar riffs that would really do it just aren’t there. The band also seem to have tried to rescue some tracks using a very high-tempo snare blasting technique, similar to terrorcore and the like, but it hasn’t worked for the same reasons; it’s also a sound that I don’t particularly care for, so perhaps it will be more pleasing to other listeners.

Overall, this album is pretty flawed. There are still some good tracks, and it can still be an enjoyable listen at times. However, the large amount of mediocre songs and the absence of good riffs really drags it down a few pegs. The change in vocal style has also worked against the band, as has the lessened aggression and duller riffing style. This may still be of interest to fans of the band; it’s going to have far less appeal to the metal audience in general, however. It’s not an intolerable album but it really does signal the beginning of the end for the band.