Album: "Fear Forms Function" (1999)
Label: DSBP
Style: Electro-industrial
Songs: songs

Reviewed by: Darklight

It really surprises me to hear albums now such as this System Der Dinge release that don’t offer anything new or different to the electro-industrial genre. This album is about as basic as it gets. Think of any European dark EBM band from the past and you can pretty much guess what System Der Dinge sounds like. Their music is created by energetic electronic programming, haunting melodies, driving bass beats, movie samples and somber somewhat treated male vocals. Every cliché known to man is included upon this album. There is absolutely nothing original or unique to be found here. This is about as cookie-cutter as it gets. But I’m a sucker for this genre of music, so I do somewhat enjoy this album.

While everything offered here has been done to death already, I still find it appealing. The fact is that this band does produce very full well layered music that is rather enjoyable to listen to. There’s a lot of orchestrated drama in the music, and the beats are solid. The vocals blend pretty well with the music, but do sound the same on every song. Actually, that’s one of the main problems with this CD; every song sounds the same. The vocals and music never really change. It’s difficult to tell the songs apart. But the CD does flow smoothly throughout its course with only a couple of snags along the way such as a few songs sounding like they were recorded differently having more of a muffled sound with too much distortion on the singing.

In the end, this is a promising first effort for this band. I just hope that they try some new ideas on their next release as opposed to just copying a sound that has been delivered enough already in this scene.