Naurea - New Zombie Generation
Naurea has intermittently produced music since 2002, but they’ve
managed sixteen years without any appreciable advance in technique or skill.
The latest twelve song release from the project, New Zombie Generation, is
so singularly bereft of inspiration experienced listeners will ask themselves
what Abel Oliva Menendez, the project’s mastermind working under the nom de
plume Olimann, hoped to accomplish with its release beyond satisfying his own
ego. Many of the tracks sport musical arrangements hardly different from their
counterparts and others are bald faced imitations of their betters in this
style. His songwriting expends a lot of energy aping genre tropes from horror
and fantasy fiction, but with no discernible effect on the songwriting quality
or entertainment value. Instead, they are ramroded into a mishmash with
fragmented and melodramatic pseudo-musings. It’s often offensive, as well,
thanks to its total lack of any meaningful sense of humor.
“Sugar Sun” opens the album on a less than promising note and previews
an approach we’ll hear for the entirety of New Zombie Generation. Menendez opts for the
path of least resistance with each of the album’s songs and makes previous
little attempt to meaningfully vary any of the album’s first three tunes. The
following tracks “Boygirl Vampire” and “Welcome to Monsterland” essentially
follow the same musical path with little variation. Naurea doesn’t build the
entire collection around its guitar work, but it plays a significant role and
fails at every turn thanks to its lack of imagination and poor production
values. The former quality is more fully in evidence over the course of the
album’s first three songs and gets New Zombie Generation off to a distinctly
inauspicious start.
“Hello Mr. Bull” is another nadir as Menendez continues
plundering the catalogs of greater composers for his inspiration and produces
nothing of any individual note. Some performers are adept enough to build long
and successful careers on the back of outright mimicry, but Menendez can’t
because he never properly understood what he heard to begin with. “Mama
Cadaver” has a particularly gruesome point of view Menendez does nothing to
redeem with any saving grace of humor and, instead, hits listeners with much of
the same musical nonsense we’ve heard with earlier tunes. “Dead I Am” leans
more on Menendez’s industrial rock influences and comes off as little else than
an unmitigated rip off of Nine Inch Nails and other such fare without a single
transformative quality to be heard.
The jagged synthesizer propelled attack of “Fast Food is the New
Religion” might signal, to some, a chance for Menendez to actually shine, but
he disappoints once again with depressingly one note arrangement that could
have been something more in the hands of a composer with any discernible
evidence of creativity. More blatantly mimicry comes with “Nail in the Eye”, a
virtual paean to Downward
Spiral era Nine Inch Nails, but sadly lacking any lyrical or
musical ingenuity. Few musical experiences in recent memory pretend to be more
than Naurea’s New
Zombie Generation, but there’s nothing here beyond the sound of an
inferior talent aspiring to competence and falling far short.
Joshua Beach
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