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Fake
Los Angeles Synthetic

Static Sky Records

Posted: Tuesday, March 28, 2006
By: Ilker Yucel
Editor

While he may be best known as the front man of System Syn, Clint Carney is a man of many talents. Besides his work in remixes and as the live keyboardist for Imperative Reaction, he's also started his own solo industrial project, Fake. It may not be a dramatic departure from the heavy synth and beat driven music of his better-known projects, but the songs on Fake's debut, Los Angeles Synthetic, show a much more aggressive mentality. There is less emphasis on dark melodies, focusing more on mechanical atmospheres and lyrical angst that might seem campy to some, but does lend to the more industrial flavor Fake has over System Syn or Imperative Reaction. Songs like "UnEvolved" and "To This Land" can come across as downright cruel in their accusatory delivery of lines such as "God hates you" and "Just pave the road with the bodies of our children," while others like "The Massacre" sound almost laughable in the seriousness of such oh-so-angst-ridden lyrics. There is a slight degree of synthesizer ingenuity at work in Fake's music, with the faux-orchestral opening of "Burning You" and the soundtrack-esque "On the Edge" sounding like something out of a MIDI-programmed computer game, before leading into a more hi-tech sounding barrage of distorted beats and arpeggio bass lines. However, most of the music follows this formula, and while it does give each track a sense of catchiness and some flow of continuity from the beginning of the album to the end, it's all too formulaic to bear repeated listening. Clint's vocals are also reminiscent of System Syn, but with a more seething edge a la distortion and reverb effects. Of course, that's nothing new either as almost every terror EBM act out there does the same thing. All in all, Fakets Los Angeles Synthetic is an album marred by banality. The songs in themselves are not bad, but between the standard verse/chorus arrangements, and production that can be found on any modern harsh electro album, they also offer nothing of considerable interest, making Fake more of a fluke than anything.