Artist: Stray
Title: Letting go
Genre: Ambient, Dark Electro
Release Date: 4th May 2012
Label: Alfa Matrix
Album Review
For many years, Erica Dunham - aka famous front-woman for UNTER NULL - has been filling our souls with her songs gloominess and pleasing our ears with harsh electro beats. We all know and love UNTER NULL (at least most of us). But let's forget about it, because there's something brand new on the way now. Of course, I'm talking about Erica's side project STRAY and her latest album called ‘Letting go’. This album can be a pretty big surprise for all those people who are used to UNTER NULL and associate Erica only with it. You won't hear harsh electro on ‘Letting go’. The first STRAY project album ‘Abuse by Proxy’ was released in 2008 and was well-received. So let's have a look at her new work.
There is no angriness in ‘Letting go’, only calm dark sadness and tons of melancholy. Slow deep melodies perfectly combine ambient, electro and, what may come as a surprise, classical-sounding instrumentals. This release is full of beautiful slow music and lyrics, which are a little bit sad, but still beautiful in their own way. However, despite of all its advantages, ‘Letting Go’ has one big disadvantage. The biggest disappointment of this release is Erica's voice. Every song is full of "auto-tune". Sometimes ‘Letting Go’ feels as if almost perfect tracks sound worse just because of the excessive use of strangely tuned vocals. Thus if I have an opportunity I prefer to listen to music with clear vocals or even without any. I have nothing against using this plug-in, but I'm not a fan of its overusing. Let's just say that UNTER NULL with harsh distorted vocals is more pleasant to my ears than STRAY’s way of “singing”.
In conclusion I can say that ‘Letting Go’ is pretty dark, moody and in a good way melancholic release with amazingly charming music and lyrics. The only thing I might wish to Erica is to work harder on her clean vocals so one day we would be able to hear her actually singing. Nevertheless if you like UNTER NULL's music you should listen to STRAY's ‘Letting Go’ anyway and make your own opinion about it.
Tracklist
01. Surround Me to Passage D
02. Remember Me
03. Let Me Go
04. The Failure Epiphany
05. Out of Place
06. No Vacancy
07. Low And Lower
08. 31 and Falling
09. All I Wanted
10. Obsolete
11. Miles From Here
Line-up
Erica Dunham – writer and producer
Website
http://www.myspace.com/stray23
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 8
Sound: 6
Total: 7 / 10
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