Customer Reviews

Musique

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

Musique(2000). Theatre Of Tragedy's fourth studio album.

Evereywhere I look, I'm constantly trying to find new and interesting female-fronted gothic rock/industrial bands. I was introduced by The Gathering first, followed by Lacuna Coil, Within Temptation, Lullacry, After Forever, and others. All of them had something special about their vocalists, songwriting, and the band backing them. For a while, I kept hearing about this other band, Theatre Of Tragedy, and that they've been praised from various places, so when I saw one of their albums at CD Tradepost, I purchased it off of a whim, not having heard a single track.

Then to my horror, I looked at the reviews for Musique before popping it in, and found the general consensus was that it was their worst album and that they sold out to Euro pop music. I became worried and thought that people were being a little harsh on them. So I started playing it with an open mind, though cautious as to what reviews have stated.

Unfortunately, this time they were right.

The first word that popped into my mind was "tacky". And coming from a guy who can listen to a lot of 80s pop rock with no problems, that's saying a lot. Usually when you turn off an album partway through the first listen because you've had enough of it, that's never a good sign. Successive listens haven't helped much either. There are many problems that must be addressed, but the main reason responsible for this album's failure and the single place I can point to first and foremost is vocalist Raymond I. Rohonniy. I positively can't stand his thick, campy, and fake english accent that manages to permeate and destroy the music. By the second song, I wanted to punch the guy in the face and yell "Cut it out!" Imagine the vocalist that fronts the famous 70s punk band The Clash, only with an awful toneless sound. He often attempts "spoken word" sections to most of the songs in order to convey this "technology meets music" theme they have going on, but they just don't work well at all because he tries to be serious and ends up sounding cringe-inducing. In the future, ToT should cut out or at least limit the amount of places this guy can take up in the music.

Secondly, the instrumentation reeks of crappy techno sound effects. Don't get me wrong, I actually like techno when it has a decent melody and lately I've been getting into more electronic music, but there are WAAAAY too many random sound effects all over the place to be able to take any of it seriously. Synthesizers and keyboards don't really bother me because I'm a huge fan of them when they're utilized properly, but here they manage to take the cheesiest sounds and throw them all in a blender, resulting in a real mess. I'm not a fan of Euro pop, but I'm pretty sure there are much better examples around than this.

Now the reason why I gave this album 2 1/2 stars instead of one is because there are scattered areas between all the songs that are actually decent and show some potential. Vocalist Liv Kristine Espene is the main source of this. Her voice is very beautiful and shines when she comes on. The guitars usually come out during her parts as well and so the combination works. Unfortunately you have to sit through the other vocalist's torturous sections to get to them. The two sections don't mix very well together resulting in very uneven and inconsistent music throughout the disc. It's as if they couldn't decide which style they prefer, so they just left everything on there.

The album starts off okay with 'Machine' and later tracks like 'Image' and 'Crash/Concrete' aren't too bad either, but they are balanced off with corball songs like 'Musique', 'City Of Light', and 'Radio'. The strange thing is, the best song on the disc was the unlisted track 12, which serves as a decent rocker. I don't need to comment on the others because I've addressed the issues on them already.

Replayability: Seldom. Listened to it a few times, then shelved it.

So this ended up being a poor introduction to the band for me and I hope they can change for the better in the future. On Musique, they appear to be a band in trouble. Most have said that their earlier albums are much better in comparison, so I may check those out in the future. RECOMMENDATION TO AVOID UNLESS YOU LIKE EUROPOP, THEN GIVE IT A SHOT.

Recommendations instead:
-ToT's earlier albums (haven't heard them yet, but they've got to be better than this)
-'Manylion' or 'Nighttime Birds' by the Gathering
-'Comelies' or 'Unleashed Memories' by Lacuna Coil
-'Crucify My Heart' by Lullacry

I honestly don't understand why bands try to stray away from what once used to work. Theatre of Tragedy was such a great band when Liv Kristine was singing beautiful soprano and Raymond was joining her with his grimm vocals, but now they've totally gone to a new electronic/techno path.

Personally, if this was ToT's first album, I would have given it a higher rating. The reason why I'm giving it such a low rating is because their potential and talent is much higher than what they put out in here. Every band does go through some change at one time or another. Moonspell did with their "Butterful Fx" album. Tiamat, The Gathering, and Therion all went through changes of their own, but this disparity between ToT's first two albums and their last two albums is enormous.

If this is what they wish to sound like though, nobody can blame them. I just hope that this is an experiment and that they get back on the right track soon. This album wouldn't sound so bad if another band came out with it, but for a band such as ToT that can captivate their audience with their beautiful singing and musical talents, this is a total change...

now this is the album that threw a lot of people off ,including myself at the beginning.I myself used to love TOT`s old style way back when so when Musique came out i was higly disappointed ad actually kind of hated it. After having put it down for a while and then going back to it I listened to it with fresh ears.yes it's not the Theatre of tragedy of old.Hey, it's not even metal.so if you're expecting to get some melodic gothic metal or whatever don`t expect it here.that having said i found this to be highly enjoyaple piece of...electro gothic rock?The songs are shorter than they used to be but more densely layered and faster and found them to be quite good. Anyway if you enjoy electro/industrial gothic rock but if you're expexting melodic githic rock you may want to look elsewhere

I was excited for this album to come out. . . I hate it. This could possibly be the most disappointing CD I've ever heard. Why does Raymond want to sound like a robot version of the guy from the B-52s? If you want my honest opinion, Theatre of Tragedy need to get off their high horses. Their sell-out may have even surpassed Metallica's. Has anyone been to their website lately? Talk about a bunch of ego-driven jerks! I'm into metal that has a groove, but I'd still like it to be intelligent. I also like it when people play instruments. Why aren't the guitar players in this band bored?? There's more programming in this CD than there is in Windows 2000! I don't know what possessed them to make an album like this, but they need an exorcist badly. It's sad when a hard core Theatre of Tragedy fan like me just doesn't care anymore. I don't know what they're up to these days (probably playing dance clubs) and sadly I don't care. I am one of too many incredibly disappointed ex-fans.

Much like other extreme metal bands (Cradle of filth,Dimmu Borgir,Arcturus)Tot tried to progress to something new with each album.The jump from Velvet darkness to Aegis worked well and from Aegis to Musique they progressed even more.But was the progression worth it? Not really.Sure the album isnt Particularly great, The music is not as dark as it used to be,The lyrics are somewhat cheesy and Livs vocal style doesnt seem to fit like it used to.But its not all bad the album does have its own charms,if you can push the above aside it makes a great Electro/Goth album and at club level would probably fit in perfectly.If you are after gothic metal Try the first two albums but if you want something to dance to that still has goth aesthetics you might actually enjoy it. Eitherway id recommend it above trash "gothic" metal like Lacuna coil.

this is completely different to old theatre of tragedy and since their first album they have been changing quite slowly, aegis being quite an obvious chang, the growls gone, replaced by slow clean vocals. Then there is this album: gone are the days of raymonds old english poems, gone is the growling, gone are the slow heavy mournful songs, and theatre of tragedy have taken a 180 step in the other direction. this is a very different album with robotic voices, lyrics which are about very abstract things and more up beat fast songs withe heavy synth use. It's experimenting which is a good thing. I can't stand it when people slag a band off because they have changed. They are doing what they want to do and if you dont like it then stick with their old releases. But this isn't a bad album. I'm not giving it four stars because the lyrics are not much to my liking, but Liv Kristine makes the band worth listening to. she is one of the few female vocalists around nowadays who sing and sing well. Theatre of Tragedy kicked her out after this album for reasons I am unsure of and for their new album Assembly they have a new female vocalist though not as good as Liv Kristine. If you like theatre of tragedy for Liv then this album is worth buying as she sings quite a lot in this album but if you like the old theatre of tragedy albums and do not have an open mind then stick with the same old music and don't slag off experimental bands just because they have changed and you don'yt like it.

Yes yes I know, Theatre of Tradgety has changed much from it's roots. This album is nothing like the first releases. This is their only cd I own currently, but I do have some experience with their earlier sound. As a fan of black/symph black metal, I bought this cd in a bulk order with tons of other stuff. Anyways, it was so awesome I listened to it twice in one night. For me to listen to any cd twice is rare because I have so many, let alone in one evening.

Yes, Theatre of Tradgety has become more like a European Synthpop band. Fans of CruxShadows, Zeromancer, etc would probably find this album interesting. I never had any Synthpop cds, but I'm going to be picking up a few more. This is a GOOD release, it's not black metal though.

Well, TOT were definitely not the only ones coming from the metal genre to experiment with industrial music. Look at Atrocity, Samael, Moonspell, the Kovenant and Mortiis for instance. So I think it's unfair to single out TOT as "sellouts" - no matter what your definition of the word is. It is clear to me that the band just got bored with their genre, and that's okay. I mean, if we were given a boring, uninspired gothic album after the Aegis masterpiece, no one would have liked that either. Plus, even though some would like to disagree, Musique is actually a pretty good album. Although it has a tendency to get choppy in places, the new "futuristic-sounding" synthesizers fit quite well with the new style of songwriting. Liv Kristine, as always, sounds great (see: Commute) and is sandwiched together with Raymond Rohonyi's new (and rather strange) English-accented vocals. Hein's drumming sounds pretty good (there's actually a lot more drumming and riffing going on in this album than on their next album, Assembly) and Frank doesn't sound too bad (although the new industrial-style riffing sounds fairly lame). With the departure of Eirik T. Saltro, there was no bassist for this album. Instead, we are given a slight layer of...noise to replace it. To be honest, you can't even tell they don't have a bass player, because most of the songs have so much going on already (especially with the multiple layers of synths) that, even if there were a bass, it would easily be drowned out by everything else. Lorentz Aspen, as usual, really impressed me. In the previous albums, we saw what he could do with a piano and some brief synths on Aegis. Here, he has a lot more responsibility for shaping the songs and he pulls his job off well. However, due to TOT's lack of experience within this genre, there are frequent "bits" of sound that often pop up that just seem detached or completely out of place. Luckily, they fixed this up with Assembly, but here they couldn't be helped so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Personal highlights for me include the beautiful "Machine", the poppy "Image", the two Rammstein-ish tracks "City of Light" and "Crash/Concrete", and my personal favorite, the upbeat "Commute". The album's only individual downfalls would be the annoying and obnoxious title track, and also the somewhat boring "Retrospect".

I doubt most of the fans of the first three albums will take kindly to Musique (or Assembly for that matter), but I know a lot of fans of industrial or synthpop will, so if you belong to the latter, you owe it to yourself to ignore the bad reviews and give Musique a listen. If you can get past the cheesy lyrics and occasional detached synths, you've got one hell of an album on your hands. And really, that's all that matters.

8.5/10

After many years following ToT this turned out to be a major disappointment.

** Off to figure out the return policy **

Yet another formerly great metal band has been lost to the clutches of Eurotrash electronica. There is very little to commend about this album other than the still great soprano vocals.

I knew I would see reviews here commending the band for "experimenting" and saying that if you're at all "open-minded" you will see that they know what they're doing. And voila! here they are.

The should-be-unnecessary qualification is that I am in fact "open-minded": two of my favorite recent albums are Arcturus' "La Masquerade Infernale" and Lake of Tears' "Forever Autumn," which are barely metal, if at all.

What amuses me most about metal fans who continue to defend stuff like this (and The Gathering, Tiamat, etc.) is that they buy the non-metal stuff from formerly metal bands but apparently don't get into the top bands in those non-metal fields! How many of you defenders of "Musique" are buying the top techno albums, which are presumably better than "Musique" on their own terms? I'll venture a wild guess of "none."

The simple fact is that this music is boring and unemotional. There is simply nothing to _respect_ here, let alone enjoy. Let the Germanic rave-going she-males get their bootie moving to this music - I'm going to move on.