CALIBRATED COLLISION COURSE

One can chart a variety of courses in the service of "making a point". Artists often choose a vague "route" in preference to a "path", to appeal to a moderately sophisticated audience, analogous to giving a hiker a general idea of the trajectory rather than specific routes and distances. Then there are the unfortunate cases of artists who smack their audience in the back of the head and tell them exactly where to go. In so doing they elevate themselves and degrade their potential fans. "Calibrated Collision Course" would be the poster child for this form of enfant terrible.

In a word, the sound here is chaotic in a perhaps deliberately unsettling manner. The musical disharmony matches the ceaseless diatribes about how we're all going to hell in a handbasket through society's overconsumption of resources be they comestible or of entertainment value. As if these weren't about as subtle as a hammer laying into a mosquito, add in news clips about global warming and, well, news clips, and you get the idea. It might have worked as a multimedia presentation, or as 5 minutes of filler in a green documentary, but one tuneless and tedious hour amounts to a jaw dropping overbite, if I can understate the case.

Points of comparison are thankfully hard to come by, but QUEEN with a correspondence school PHD comes to mind, as well as the Quebecois crossover group KAOS MOON, but GALADRIEL has neither the lofty fluffiness of the former nor the instinct for restraint and melody of the latter. Apart from the first couple of minutes of "Leap Of Faith", this CD forges one pigheaded and irreversible collision course with sanity.