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Album Title Goes Here (stylized as > album title goes here <) is the sixth studio album by Canadian electronic music producer deadmau5. It was released on September 25, 2012 through Ultra Records in Canada and the United States, while being released internationally a day prior through Virgin Records. Recorded between 2009 and 2012, the album was primarily produced by Joel Zimmerman whilst featuring guest appearances from Wolfgang Gartner, Gerard Way from American rock band My Chemical Romance, American hip hop group Cypress Hill, English recording artist Imogen Heap, and Chris James. According to Zimmerman, the album is partially a compilation of songs that were previously recorded and not released as singles. Musically, while Album Title Goes Here primarily uses influences of progressive house and electro house, it also incorporates genres such as electronica, trance and hip hop.
User Album Review
He’s a divisive sort, deadmau5. That’s okay, many of music’s most interesting characters are. But it’s notable that he – he being 31-year-old Toronto EDM producer Joel Zimmerman – seems to thrive off putting noses out of joint.
Whether he’s declaring that DJ culture “bores me to f***ing tears”, or explaining the nature of electronic live performance as “pressing the space bar”, or clashing with figures as diverse as Madonna to Paris Hilton to A Guy Called Gerald, it is quite clear that the man in the mouse’s head is not out to make friends.
There is little love, peace and understanding to >album title goes here<. From the snarky title to the oppressive robo-beat barrage that is his stock-in-trade, Zimmerman has the stance of a pugilist. This in itself can be fairly impressive. Superliminal and Channel 42 advance impassively, hydraulic and monstrous, crushing all in their path with insistent four-to-the-floor rhythm and heavy, saturated synth.
Professional Griefers, meanwhile – named, presumably, in honour of those who intentionally disrupt multi-player online video games – enlists My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way for a guitar-smeared stomp reminiscent of Marilyn Manson in its evil countenance and deranged wreckage of imagery: “Morning sickness / X-Y-Z / Teenage girls with ESP!”
Undoubtedly, though, there is a lack of soul to this set. The peaks and troughs are too artificially plotted to feel properly euphoric, and even when Zimmerman does come upon a sweet melody he calls it something like Fn Pig and nails it senselessly to a lurching, head-banger beat. Only on the closing Telemisccommunications, a shimmering cloud of glitch-electro relating a relationship lived through transatlantic telephone lines, does he really find something approaching emotion.
Perhaps a little more time spent listening to his dance music forbearers would give >album title goes here< a little heart. Right now, for all its impressive fireworks, it feels hollow as its title.
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