Pulse of Humanity - SIGnAL (Review)

After I listened to the new album by Pulse Of Humanity, I wondered “what is skill”? Most of the peoples will say something like “skill is the ability to influence emotions”. A narrow aesthic circle will say "masters are not obliged to be understood by the majority." However, my words are difficult to fit into one sentence.

My Rating: 66/100      Best song: Dystopia / Utopia

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No, this album did not surprise me. Here you can hear fairly simple patterns with lots of synthesizer. But the main album feature is a wide variety of patterns. Needless to say that composer did a good job? I think this is superfluous. Composer has worked hard on diversity. Of course, there is still a long time to improve their skills. Nevertheless, the first thing that can be heard is a large number of sounds with not very high sound extraction intensity. That is, the listener's ears are constantly busy with something. There are no clever intro here. The album has just begun - right away Korg synthesizers and guitar on Drop A tuning flow into the listener's ears.

Vocalists perfectly complement this picture. Here you can hear two voices - male and female. Male voice is predominantly occupied by extreme technicians. Extreme techniques are quite diverse: here growling, screaming, pigsqueal and even guttural. Female voice uses classical techniques and is similar to discantus (it’s not even a coloratura soprano, which I like so much). However, you can also notice the use of vocoder in some vocal parts. Moreover, several tracks with a clear voice and several vocoders are used simultaneously. I never understood why vocoders are needed if skill can be expressed with a clear voice? However, sound designer here showed cunning and did not mixed up anything - this is a nice detail.

Instrumental parts are very intense, but not very difficult. The first thing to notice is guitar. Guitar parts are also not very difficult - only in track 3 you can hear an interesting riff. However, it's noticeable that guitarist also wrote the synthesizer's parts. This is noticeable in the structure of guitar and synthesizer parts - they complement each other perfectly. Synthesizers in this release are a separate topic that cannot be solved in one entry. Also with the help of synthesizers they tried to recreate an interesting solo in the style of Tom Morello in track 8. But it looks like cucumbers were added to ice cream. Rhythm section - there are a lot of pop patterns that scratching the ears. The rest - interesting sets of rhythms.

The whole album is a pile-up of many sounds in one pile, and the main part of composer's work was to make it sound as acceptable as possible. I'm scared to imagine the number of tracks in sequencer (if there are usually more than 50 of them) and butthurt of sound designer. Well, I can say that these guys did their job well. They play well on contrasts, on intensity and on unusualness. But they lack something of principle. It's difficult to explain rationally, it's at the level of shades of composing work. The best idea for the band would be not to pile up a large number of notes, but to work on compositions structure as a whole. Because the composer, instead of removing the excess from the music editor, could do something more useful.