Review Summary: On their debut LP, Knife Party make an admirable attempt to show some maturity and growth. Problem is, for every attempt at maturation, there's at least 5 instances of the same old mistakes.
Now that Knife Party have made a full length album, I have finally found it in me to find something positive to say about Knife Party: they've finally found a way to take a novel approach to the rather generic popular EDM sound by, instead of being heavily reliant on migraine synths and what the "in thing" is nowadays, they add some of their own tricks into the mix. This is perhaps most evident in the album's second track, "Resistance", where among the "anthem" gimmicks and cacaphonic semi-musical synthesizer noise, there's an attempt to make it into something resembling an actual song instead of repeating the same four bars with a new synth riff every few measures. In addition, the song is actually pretty catchy, and even the migraine synth riff is actually pretty enjoyable. But as soon as it's done, it's only gone in one ear and out the other. Just like the previous 3 EPs, Knife Party still isn't sure what they want to be yet. Having abandoned Drum N Bass project Pendulum for the newer Brostep sound, Rob Swire and Gareth McGrillen evidently have lots of talent- hell, just look at how many computers Swire needed to render to get the perfect synth sound in Pendulum. Problem is, even despite the obvious talent being there, and the constant teases of "hey look, guys, we're actually gonna make a decent album for once" throughout, even those aren't enough to disguise the emptiness of the experience.
Make no mistake,
Abandon Ship is indeed the band's best work to date. There's actually a few enjoyable tracks here and there. The problem is, they're buried beneath loads and loads of the duo's laziness and unwillingness to make music from the hearts. It's a shame, because while listening to
Abandon Ship, I found myself believing those sudden outbursts of greatness. One particularly enjoyable track here is "EDM Trend Machine", which shows the group dabbling in 1990s sounds, the melody not sounding too far from something that ATC would have released, and is even built around a rather soulful vocal sample that really transcends the track. Problem is, it's immediately followed with "404", which is ultimately one if the real lowest points on not just the album, but also the band's career as a whole. Even if you were able to listen to all of "Power Glove" from
Haunted House, you'll find yourself gritting your teeth trying to put up with it's rather "frankensong" quality. Numerous times, the song even tries to use Windows 7 noises to disguise its lack of creativity. And that's pretty much a perfect template of what the whole album is like, really. Even if you can bear to listen to one whole track, there's a whole lot of shit to dig through, and it's exhausting to do so. For every "Resistance" or "EDM Trend Machine", there's at least 3 "Micropenis" tracks or "D.I.M.H."s. Even more sadistic, some of those tracks start out with real promise- "Begin Again" beings sounding like a spiritual successor to Pendulum's "The Island", but even after Swire's beautiful vocal part, it suddenly devolves into generic EDM nonsense.
In the end, it would be unfair to condemn these guys too much, because there's certain moments that sound as if they legitimately gave a shit. Predictably, if you didn't like these guys before, there's nothing here that will convince you otherwise. And furthermore the album could generally be considered a contender for "biggest waste of potential" of the year. As if the title wasn't enough of an indication, tracks like "Micropenis" show just how mature Swire really is (shocking to think the same person who wrote emotional gob-smackers such as "Encoder" and "9000 Miles" wrote this). Tracks like "404" show just how creative he is nowadays, which is to say not much. Swire may spend 15 hours of his day on mixing software when it comes to his music, but ridiculous amounts of time can only go far when the resulting music sounds so painfully cut-and-paste.
