Boasting an electro-industrial-rawk sound, ‘The Digital Divide’ is a high energy, pulsating album with the word epic at its very core. It serves as an update to the rock-dance crossover that saw some popularity in the mid ‘90’s, the likes of Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy,’ Apollo 440 and The Prodigy, who at the time served as the aggressive antidote to the waves of cheeky-chappy Britpop that storm-trooped the charts during those halcyon summers. It contains some quite excellent moments, but it’s not a uniformly brilliant album.
‘Generation Waste’ sounds like the decent song The Automatic never got around to making. It’s acerbic and lively, but completely accessible with a melody that’s pretty much instantly infectious. ‘Aim Low’ is exactly the sort of music I imagine a US soldier has pumped into their ears when they’re geeing themselves up for combat – punchy, dramatic, a total fuck-yeah song, and that’s not intended to be disparaging. The strength of this album is the number of different genre clubs it could be played in, providing a heavy moment for the indie disco, whilst probably providing a more populist moment for the moshers, not to mention a certain appeal for those with
Occasionally Victory Pill's electro-rawk element grates for the usual reasons. It frequently falls into generic Kerrang fodder and just isn’t quite acerbic enough for what it’s trying to be (see ‘Burnout’ as a prime example). In fact, the three songs featuring Graeme Cornies on vocals are collectively the weakest songs on the album. He adds a self-pitiful element to proceedings, with the sort of semi-emo warbling that can only provoke derision from this reviewer.
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It’s not a dangerous album, it sticks with convention on the whole, but does so powerfully, and in a way that could resonate beyond those that you’d traditionally expect to like this music. However, after the initial sucker punches at the beginning of the album, it does fall into its own formula fairly quickly.
In all honesty, I anticipated that this was going to be an appalling album, and it wasn’t. The crowds would go wild for this at the Download festival, certainly, and you couldn’t judge them for that. They might want to leave their guest vocalist at home, though.
Victory Pill on MySpace
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