Klayton is a busy man. Not only is he the owner of FiXT, he also has three different music projects: Scandroid, Celldweller and Circle of Dust. Combined these three projects have released 10 albums this year, with and eleventh being release on the ninth of december. Scandroid’s self titled debut album is one of these.
Concept
The self titled album is a concept album that
The second song, Salvation Code, is the first song ever released under the Scandroid project. Up to this day it is still one of my favourite songs. Not only is the song once again good in creating the right atmosphere instrumentally, the lyrics also fit really well in the story and give you a couple of questions which will be answered in the following songs. By putting certain effects over certain vocals and mimicking sounds that come might come straight from how we assume future technological equipment might sound, it tells a lot about the characters in this story. In the end everything has been worked out perfectly.
Falsetto
Something you wouldn’t expect as a fan of Klaytons work, would be hearing him use his falsetto voice, however, this is the case in both Aphelion and Shout, the Tears for Fears cover. Even though the latter was originally released in 1984 and actually is a cover, it still does work well with the story.
A Klayton album isn’t complete without at least one instrumental track. Scandroid has multiple of them. In Destination Unknown the tempo gets pushed up a bit compared to the songs before it and give the same experience the Miami Vice TV Show intro does. A second instrumental track, Atom & E.E.V. surprises you pleasantly as well with it’s sort of sax-solo in the middle which fits surprisingly well with the synthesizer violence around it. Both are great tracks for those who enjoy the Soundtrack to the Voices in My Head and Transmissions series.
Older Work
Nearly every album has its downsides and so does this one. The biggest one is the fact that the best songs on this album have been released quite a while ago and show remarkable higher levels of originality and quality. Especially with the new track Neo-Tokyo it can be seen that writing these huge amounts of music seems to take its toll. The lyrics feel like a hodgepodge of the lyrics of the other songs on the album and the instrumentals just sound uninspired.
Luckily the following track, Pro-Bots & Robophobes makes us forget all about this. This tracks has the biggest balls of the whole album. This is probably because Klayton mixed in some of the industrial effects he would normally use as Circle of Dust, which thus features in this track. The track itself leaves little room for improvement, but the story in it and it’s position on the album cause a bit of confusion. It feels like the space of the CD was running out and the story needed to be finished soon.
Even though with Pro-bots & Robophobes the story seems to take leaps in the plot similar to
Conclusion
Scandroid isn’t the perfect album, but it definitely isn’t bad either. Even though the best individual tracks are already available on the internet for quite some time, it is the complete story that has to draw you into the album. Isn’t it better to read a book if you want a story, you ask? Well, that depends on whether you want all the details already to be filled in or prefer to let your imagination do most of the work. Is the latter not your thing? Well good news for you: Klayton cooperated with a group of writers to release a Cyberpunk themed book, which has been released on the 8th of November.
Score: 7/10
