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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How techno blended with rock is supposed to sound, November 20, 2001
By A Customer
God Lives Underwater is living proof that many of the most talented musicians in the music industry go unheard of for long periods of time before any mainstream following develops, sometimes these artists go their entire career without being fully discovered by the audience they deserve. Just goes to show how often people choose garbage over real music nowadays.From the opening synthesized guitar line of "Still" all the way through to the very end of "Scared", "Empty" does not let up, combining alternative and heavy progressive rock with some of the weirdest, most trippy sound effects and progression from modern electronica/techno. The only way to really explain God Lives Underwater is just the fact that there is really no other band like them, their closest similarities being Stabbing Westward and Nine Inch Nails. However, the most impressive quality of this group is that it is composed only of two members, who ideally do a better job than the 5 man bands spitting pure waste onto records and calling it music these days. Suiting both the electronica as well as the hard rock fan, most of the songs weigh more heavily towards one genre for the instrumental portion, but every track conveys painful, heartaching lyrics and contains catchy, energy-filled choruses. Songs such as "All Wrong" with its progressive blues-scale guitar line, "No More Love", "Fool", and the aggressive "Don't Know How To Be" rely more on nicely timed drumming and distorted electric guitars to keep the music flowing nicely, making this some of the best hard rock for awhile, while other tracks such as "Weaken", "Tortoise", and "Empty" base their sounds more on synthesizers and keyboard lines, showing off their techno influences. The only tracks where the band slows down from their aggressive, energy-filled performance are in "23", a captivating song about loneliness and searching for answers in life, making it one of the best songs on the album. "Scared" is the most mellow song on the record, and unfortunately also the weakest, but it still maintains quality by throwing in the adversity of acoustic guitars. Standout tracks are "All Wrong", with its catchy guitar line, "No More Love" as it blends guitar with keyboard into a virtual frenzy, "23" showing the groups soft side, "Weaken" giving bright techno influence, and "Empty" with its chorus. This album definitely got more mainstream attention than their later release, "Life In The So-Called Space Age" (also a great album) due to the catchy choruses and guitars, both of which were lost on the very non-radio friendly "Spage Age" record. Fans of electronic music and rock alike can rejoice with this band. "Empty" and the self titled EP both have the same feel to them, but the newer "Life In The So-Called Space Age" takes the music to a different angle. I would only recommend "Space Age" to the fan of Radiohead and like-minded music, but "Empty" has a friendly catchiness that most fans of hard music can appreciate.
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