Review Summary: earbud in ear hand on mouse heart turned off .exe launched
Last Sunday, my roommate downloaded an app named "IRL." He received an anonymous invite to download it, and sent several of us the same invites after using it for a few minutes. After opening it and entering in our information, we found that it was designed to help people set up activities and connections in real life, with options to create a miniature group chat for each activity, a simulation of talking to your friends but with all the subtlety of anonymous invites and the facelessness of a "party" GIF. There were a limited set of extremely generic activities that you could choose from, with an option to email suggestions to the developers, as well as a variety of preloaded superlatives to anonymously nominate your friends for. It was basically a slightly more accurate skeleton of actual socializing than Facebook or Groupme attempt to be. Like all these attempts at being the next big social media app, "IRL" will inevitably die within a year when the creators run out of money or motivation. But it's a hint at the direction we're most likely headed. Once someone develops a skeleton that's close enough to a human to bring FOMO to those who aren't using it, we'll be one step farther from actual interaction, another smearing of the already blurred line between reality and the internet.
Amnesia Scanner are very aware of this blurring, choosing to soundtrack this slow submersion. It is, specifically, a soundtrack -
Another Life sounds like the score to an insane video game, not something from the everyday. This is the world that
DOOM skeletonized, a world of screaming demons and digital ghouls. Where
DOOM was goofy, oddly organic, and playful, this feels aggressive, crunchy and real. Really, what it sounds like is how it felt playing violent video games as a kid - as mild as it may be looking back, it felt edgy and genuinely dark at the time.
Another Life is self-aware enough to know that its aesthetic isn’t highly original or genuinely hopeless as the hellscapish software it is inspired by attempts to be, and that works in its favor. This lives on the border between the game and the player, where one knows that it's not real but chooses to pretend it is.
Despite the focus (borderline worship) on turn-of-the-millennium sounds, this is clearly a modern album. The production is clean and polished, high-pitched vocal samples are deeply alien, and slower tracks clearly showcase love for some of the darker artists on the cutting edge in electronic music. Organs and metallic guitars stir together within structures that flirt between rock and electronica - for the first time in their career, AS sound like they're more EDM than IDM. This is, for the most part, a good thing, driving a new sense of purpose to the often scattered noise of their earlier work. Within these more accessible confines, of course, some of the exploration and sense of wonder is lost. Creating a linear plot does not necessarily remove the free-world option, but in most cases (including this one) it weakens it. That doesn't mean it's not a good experience, just one with less depth. Like "IRL"'s preloaded activities, superlatives, and chat rooms, predetermined ideas are not truly fake, but they're missing some of the soul that less precise works have. There are very clear expressive arcs these songs take, powerful, intriguing, dark arcs, but emotionally restrictive ones.
Amnesia Scanner, at their core, are chaotic. This is the key to their success, and in the past, the key to their downfall. Static and screaming don't make good music alone. Finding structure was the best thing they could have done for their music, and
Another Life excels because of that, even if they overshot a bit. This will bring more listeners than anything they've released before. If their next work could be a little bit less narrow, it could encompass the very confusing rush between URL and IRL, not just "IRL." Music has the power to clarify chaos, and in that regard,
Another Life excels. But clarity might not be the best way to define reality when it is inherently unclear.
