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Album Reviews : Dejan Toracki – Atmospheric Disturbance

By on August 22, 2014

As someone who has been a vocalist for a little while, I have a soft spot for instrumental music. While my favorite genre is the heavy metals, if you rip out the shrieking pop banshee or the crooning geriatric, I can find enjoyment in everything from dance to classical to Cloudkicker.

Except, it seems, when it’s an album dedicated entirely to solos. Especially fucking guitar solos.

I’m not sure what it is about solo artists showing off, but they always, always, end up producing music that sounds exactly the same. Whether it’s a drummer on his instructional DVD or a pan flutist flogging burnt copies of his album in the main street of your nearest city, the self-serving cunt always manages to rehash the exact same tropes a thousand other self-serving cunts have done before them. You want your happy melodies with no real resolution because there’s no real tension to begin with? You want the occasional foray into not-really-heavy bars of palm muted 1s and 0s? You want the tech bit with a random 7/8 bar? You want never ending solos searing into the delicate membrane of your ear drum with the frequency and necessity of a trephination? Well listen to a solo artist!

Full disclosure – I don’t like Atmospheric Disturbance. But I was never going to. And unfortunately for you, I can’t tell you if you’re going to dislike it as well. Because for all my wank about how much I hate this style of music, people obviously like it, and I have not the foggiest clue as to why that is. But major religions still exist and Australia recently elected Gollum as Prime Minister so I don’t think I know much about anything.

I’ve heard worse sounding albums than this; the production here is spot on, with nothing overpowering anything else. It’s good. It’s fine. You can hear all the songs being played. But why you would want to confuses and upsets me.

It’s disconcerting that these types of albums always sound like this. I remember living with a drummer years back, and we would laugh and laugh at the songs the professional drummers in his instructional DVDs would play along to. They sounded like pre-written tracks you’d find in a Midi program. The musicians obviously write the songs alone, and they’re obviously only written to serve the soloist. I think that’s my main problem with this type of thing; the songs are in service of the solo instead of the other way around.

A good solo, from jazz to death metal, serves to set a tone any other instrument (or combination of) couldn’t do at that time. It can be exciting and energizing or somber and mournful, but whatever a “good solo” is it certainly isn’t fucking flailing about across the frets for three minutes recreating the sound your computer made while it melted down after visiting that website.

This album sounds like Guitar Hero but without the friends. It’s not my thing. But, as is always the problem with reviewing instead of mass voting, it might be for plenty of people and why do you actually care about what I think? Usually I can tell if people will like an album even if I don’t, but I can’t. You might really dig this. Fucked if I know why. But I don’t want to finish this piece by saying the album is garbage. It isn’t. It’s a brilliantly produced, masterfully executed album, with some of the most technically impressive guitar playing I’ve ever heard. And I, personally, subjectively, can’t fucking stand it.

View soundbites of Dejan Toracki‘s Atmospheric Disturbance album here.

Band: Dejan Toracki
Album: Atmospheric Disturbance
Year: 2014
Genre: Heavy Metal/Instrumental
Label: Into the Pit Records
Origin: QLD

Track list:
1. Atmospheric Disturbance
2. Critical Mass
3. Ominous Warning
4. Blunt Force Trauma
5. Mercenary
6. Atomic Shadow
7. Lost
8. Aurora
9. Slide It In

About

Mitch is a 26 year old vegan, socialist, atheist, utilitarian, reductionist metalhead, stand up comedian and philosophy major that hates labels. When he isn't being politely ignored at dinner parties he's being politely ignored on comedy nights around the country.