L'ÉTRANGE MR. WHINSTER

This sole studio album by Horrific Child, which was essentially just the French artist Jean-Pierre Massiera going under an alias, originally caught my eye with the awful album cover, and I just had to investigate what it was. After repeated listens, I can say, without a doubt, the album cover isn't the worst thing about this album. It has a generally good idea in terms of where the album wants to go, but it doesn't live up to how it goes there. Normally I would be ok with experimental music, but this album just doesn't do it right. The entire time the record can't decide whether it wants to be avant-prog, a sound collage, or an experimental world album. It goes in so many directions, but the execution is horrible. The inconsistency of how much of each of these varying genres is implemented into the actual passages is also very noticeable. I understand that this was under Massiera's creative freedom, and he wanted to make an experimental record, but there's not much originality on the album because artists had already experimented in these fields and pushed these boundaries decades before this was released. Also, from what I heard, the production was mediocre at best and annoyingly lackluster at worst.

In conclusion, the rating this album already has on Progarchives is pretty good at representing what this album is like. It's truly a shame because Massiera worked on a really impressive album, Atlantide's one and only album (which I reviewed a couple of months ago), and this is the next piece of music I hear that he had a more active role in writing. And so combined with all these factors, this is a 2/5 for me, and a lot of aspects could've been improved on Horrific Child's only testament to time. I would absolutely not recommend this album.

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