Coming from the underground, brandishing his own blend of distorted electro noise pop, MAC BLACKOUT’s new self-titled debut makes for an interesting listen. I’d not known of his earlier work with bands such as the FUNCTIONAL BLACKOUTS or DAILY VOID, so I approached this CD with open ears and an open mind. Bearing an almost branded “I made this in my kitchen,” D.I.Y. ethic, the CD still comes across as a full album, not just a bunch of musical sketches created by some guy on his home computer. And there’s some good stuff here. “Everybody Rock,”, “Nowhere Man,” and “You’ve Lost Your Eyes,” are probably about as good as noise pop can get, deeply personal tunes with enough rooting in classic songwriting and pop melody that the interspersed moments of experimental noise are actually transcendent. The press release calls this music postpunk avante garde noise, like the ELECTRIC EELS, CHROME or SCREAMERS, but to me its actually more post-modernist, deconstructionist pop. Seems like MAC BLACKOUT took standard pop songs, tore them apart to their basic elements then rebuilt them in his own image, adding random, incongruent bits of sound and noise along the way.

And as I said, when it works, it works well. But when it doesn’t, it’s painful. And I mean that literally. On “Voodoo Doll,” MAC chooses a synthesized sound that sliced right through my eardrum all the way to my cerebellum, leaving a shrieking, bleeding wound in its path. It’s like taking a rhythm, then adding to the melody the annoying squeak of an un-oiled engine, the piercing shriek of two pieces of styrafoam being rubbed together then adding on top of it the sound of fingernails running down a chalkboard. Unfortunately, this happens too often for my taste. I don’t mind being challenged by music, but it shouldn’t actually be physically painful. All in all, there are some interesting bits here, and MAC has enough talent and command of melody to take his particular, twisted muse in any direction he chooses, he just needs to focus a bit more on the music, not the pain. When it works, its beautiful, when it doesn’t, it all sounds like ROBERT HAZARD with a broken synthesizer.

- Severin

OFFICIAL SITE: myspace.com/macblackout

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