Artist: Project Pitchfork
Title: Dream, Tiresias
Type: Album
Label: Trisol
German goth scene stalwarts Project Pitchfork return with their first full release in 4 years, and on the surface it’s an ambitious return with a concept album based on dreams. After 20 years, they are still making the same brand of efficient darkwave material, and if the formula isn’t broken, why try to fix it?
The promotional build up to this album promised that ‘Dream, Tiresias!’ will show the true essence of Project Pitchfork. A rather exciting claim, but the finished product is rather more predictable. Lots of keyboards, electronic drums and heavily accented growly vocals. Singer Peter Spilles comes across like a Teutonic Tom Waits, which is no bad thing and fits this style of music perfectly. Each track on ‘Dream, Tiresias!’ is subtitled ‘First dream’, ‘Second dream’ and so on, yet after a few listens, I can’t seem to work out what the overall story is with this concept album. No matter though, it’s the songs themselves we are interested in. Opening track ‘If I Could’ sets the tone with an oppressive and moody rhythm, with an overload of electronic bass. Spilles always seems to have a slight effect on his voice to give it a ‘robotic’ style, which gives the whole thing a futuristic tint. ‘Nasty Habit’ is a very upbeat track with a techno based riff, but the lyrics just sounded terrible, but that’s probably because I was only able to catch lines here and there. ‘The Tide’ sounded like mid 90’s trash pop. Anyone remember D’Ream? They had that awful song, ‘Things Can Only Get Better’? Well this sounds like that, only with a robotic Lemmy singing. Things don’t really pick up again until ‘Feel’ which was the single, which is a good track, but not outstanding. It has a reasonably catchy chorus, but its no ‘Souls’ or ‘Timekiller’. The final ‘dream’ on here is ‘Passion’, which is strange because it has none at all, and they say Germans have no sense of irony… You get three bonus tracks, all of which are remixes of ‘Feel’, by SITD, Nosuf-X and Die Krupps. Whilst I was expecting a lot from the Die Krupps mix, being a big fan of theirs, it was the SITD mix that stood out, and was overall a much better version than the original mix.
Whilst this is by no means a bad Project Pitchfork album, it’s also far from their best. It is however better than their last album ‘Kaskade’. There are some excellent songs on here, namely ‘If I Could’ and ‘Full of Life’ and they stand up well against anything they’ve released in their career. Not sure if the claim about ‘true essence’ holds up here, but what you do have is an interesting and varied album that the fans will lap up. Happy 20th Anniversary guys!
www.myspace.com/projectpitchfork
www.pitchfork.de
Lee Kimber
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