One of both the great joys and the great frustrations of working in the arts, any of the arts, is that sometimes you get an idea, but you can’t tell at first whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea. A lot of the time, you have to spend some real effort developing it before its goodness or badness becomes evident.
Which is sort of a roundabout way of saying that I don’t really blame Joe Sierra for the fact that Vicious Love really isn’t that great. Sierra isn’t a singer — he’s incredibly prolific, but most of his work is techno or instrumental trance — and so for this record, rather than hire a vocalist, he simply programmed one. All of the “vocals” on the album are in fact created by a computer program called Vocaloid, which creates pitched vocals based on a template created by a real-life singer. It’s mostly been used in J-Pop; other English-language artists, including Mike Oldfield of Tubular Bells fame, have used this software in spots before, but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone try to make and sell a full-length in English using it for all the vocals before (though I could have missed someone). That’s the idea.
Problem is, in practice, it doesn’t end up being a good idea. The computer-vox sound like the spirit of a rather bored Madonna possessing a Speak & Spell: not only the timbre, but even the timing is off, and the lyrics are often difficult to make out. It’s an effect that certainly fails to sound like an actual singer, and while I can imagine it being manipulated to sound “futuristic” in a sub-Computer World-era-Kraftwerkian way, or “disturbing” in a manner that would make Gary Numan proud, it doesn’t do either, mostly because of the lazy, elevator-trance backing. I half expected the computer to burst into a rousing chorus of “the next available service representative will assist you” — which probably would have improved my opinion of the album. The tracks all blend into each other; “What You Know,” which has slightly more aggressive programming, is probably the highlight by default, but that’s not exactly a rousing endorsement.
It was probably worth it for Sierra to take a shot at making this album, but it’s not really worth it for you to hear it, unfortunately. With luck, Sierra will already have moved on to the next idea — which, let’s hope, turns out to be a better one.
Label: Self-released
Release date: 2008
Rating: 4/10 (includes a +1 bonus for trying the concept)
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