First released in 1999, Electric Bird Noise’s debut ‘Unleashing the Inner Robot’ is receiving a fresh lease of life for those who missed it the first time around. Which was probably pretty much everyone. The blurb forewarns us that the album ‘goes all over the place from prog rock to industrial to darkwave, but always with the cinematic feeling that EBN has always had.’
And so it is that ‘Unleashing the Inner Robot’ is every bit as expansive and ambitious as you might expect. Widescreen soundscapes drift over thunderous rolling percussion to be decimated in screeds of guitar noise. Clanging industrial beats disperse into vaporous clouds of near-ambience. A collision of prog, krautrock, 80s movie soundtracks and the Wax Trax! back catalogue, it works surprisingly well. The mellow guitar passages are pure post-rock, overlayed with eddying synths you’d be more likely to expect on a Mike Oldfield or Jean Michel Jarre album.
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Probably more contemporary sounding now than it did 15 years ago, it’s an intriguing piece of space-age weirdness that’s by turns mellow and heavy and as far from predictable as you’re likely to get.
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