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Idiot Stare
Welcome to Babylon

Posted: Friday, January 26, 2007
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

Like many of the '90s coldwave and industrial rock bands, Idiot Stare have weathered the years very well, while sticking to their guns and creating a brilliant mix of hard industrial dance and blistering rock & roll. With their latest album, Welcome to Babylon, Idiot Stare offer up 10 songs of lean, mean, hard-hitting coldwave that will put many in mind of the Fifth Colvmn Records era, while maintaining a modern production edge to give these dirty rock songs a slick sheen. With the opening track, "BabyLAon," the band pays tribute to their Los Angeles roots, decrying the glitz and glamour of the city yet simultaneously celebrating it with lyrics that touch on the apparent shallowness of the West Coast. Words like "This is what we have, this is what we want / Just a fucking scene, but it's all we got," ring all too true, not just to L.A., but all across this day and age where the underground has been splintered into too many divisions that seem to thrive on conflict with each other as much as the mainstream. Other tracks like "Eye Candy" and "Porno" follow suit, with the former blasting our innate need to be stimulated by celebrity controversy, while the latter holds no mysteries as to its subject matter. Even "Ghost" evokes images of seedy hotels and junkie prostitutes just by the song's danceable groove, although the lyrics certainly help. Another one of Welcome to Babylon's strengths (and a conceivable weakness) is the conciseness of the tracks; the majority of the album hardly exceeds four minutes, aside from two tracks. However, even in the longer tracks, the music is heavy on the rhythm and pulls a few punches to keep the listener's attention and swift right by and leave you wanting more. There's some great vocoder accompaniment in "Mainframe God," giving an oddly ethereal quality to what is a rather straightforward rocker, while "Mission Improbable" is a frantic electro/industrial instrumental that races on with all the tension and excitement of a video game or secret agent film soundtrack. There's hardly anything bad one can say about Welcome to Babylon; the production is top-notch, and the band songs are tight, showing that Idiot Stare are at the top of their game. The music may not wow fans of coldwave, but it will certainly satiate their need for some guitar-driven machine rock.