Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Naurea - New Zombie Generatio



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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