Title: The Unquiet Void
Artist: Midnight Configuration
Genre: Industrial
Release Date: 13th September 2010
Label: Nightbreed Recordings
Album Review
Nottingham’s MIDNIGHT CONFIGURATION has been making dance charged Satanic Industrial for nearly 20 years now. Not content with tearing the UK Goth scene a new hole, MIDNIGHT CONFIGURATION and like minded bands provided the seminal dance-floor sounds of the 90’s courtesy of vocalist Trevor Bamford’s Nightbreed Recordings label. Fast-forward to 2010 and the band still don’t look like they will be letting up any time soon with Nightbreed Recordings evolving into the world’s biggest Gothic radio station, and now the release of MIDNIGHT CONFIGURATION’s 8th full length album.
The album features all the hard dance beats, dirty guitars and psychedelic Synth work that has become the signature MIDNIGHT CONFIGURATION’s sound. But this time the pop-hooks have found a place within the blueprints to really raise the bar as far as song writing goes. The end result is a dense layering of infectious beets, catchy grooves, hard guitars and the growled wit of Trevor Bamford. The opening tracks ‘Psychic’ and ‘Unholy Beat’ as well as the rousing ‘There’s Something About England’, ‘The Sirens of Time’, ‘Interzone’ and ‘Tesla’ are the personification of everything that MIDNIGHT CONFIGURATION do well. They show just why the band has been dance floor favourites for so many years, and how they have continued to grow in their song writing abilities. ‘Unholy Beat’ in particular has all the ingredients to become a major classic with its sly humour and fantastic interplay between the guitars and synths.
While tracks like ‘There’s Something About England’ and ‘Tesla’ turn up the aggressiveness of the band’s sound as Bamford’s vocals go into overdrive. This isn’t forgetting the out-and-out fun side of Mid Fig though, as seen on the tracks ‘Souls Carnival’ and ‘Carnival of Souls’ with their Frankenstein-esque arrangement of samples, or the cleaver mirroring of TALKING HEADS’ ‘Life During Wartime’ on ‘Interzone’. The heavy use of sci-fi samples give the album a fun quality as Theremins undercut the modern digital synths, but they also have a serious use as the out of context speech samples add another sinister dimension to the songs.
From the writing of the songs, through their performance, to the final mixing and production, this album sounds the most well rounded that MIDNIGHT CONFIGURATION ever have. There are some definite classics on here, and not one song feels like it has been added to fill space (which in a world of disposable, half-filled CDs is damn refreshing). All in all I’d say ‘The Unquiet Void’ tops the band’s fantastic previous effort ‘Parallel Worlds’ and hopefully I’ll be saying something to that effect about this when the next album comes out.
Tracklist
01. Psychic
02. Unholy Beat
03. Cauldron of Madness
04. Unexplained Phenomena
05. This Girl’s Like Radiation
06. Souls Carnival
07. Something About England
08. The Watching Others
09. Cold Pantomime
10. The Shallow Hand of Fate
11. Carnival of Souls
12. Interzone
13. Tesla
14. The Sirens of Time
15. The Winds of Limbo
16. Neverwhere
Line-up
Trevor Bamford
Estelle Silver
Nick Hopkinson
Websites
www.myspace.com/midnightconfigurationofficialpage
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 9
Sound: 9
Extras: -
Total: 9 / 10
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