Playlouder - Music is the Network

Fans of by-the-numbers rock are in for a treat, Deadly Passions by Hydrogyn (Y instead of E - how cool is that!) maybe the most formulaic, predictable album of the year so far. Yes, there’s more chance of peace in the middle east than of finding a new or unusual idea on Deadly Passions. There’s a bit of back-masking at the beginning, but they decide to back off after that...

Clues to its depressingly manufactured nature can be found all over it - right from the cover, which depicts the singer in a low cut top doing a bad Buffy the Vampire Slayer impersonation (and I like Buffy the Vampire Slayer!), to the line in the press release which pathetically describes it as femme-fatale metal. There are inspired song titles like ‘On and On’, ‘Your Life’ and ‘Over You’ and if that doesn‘t raise enough warning flags, check out the opening lyrics: ‘Here comes trouble, but I’m dealing double’. They’re just like Evanescence, only just as shite.

And as for the Alanis Morissette cover, well… There’s a lesson to be learnt here, a cautionary tale. If you’re going to cover a decent song, then you’d better be sure that you’ve got some good material of your own to put up next to it. Morissette was pretty unstoppable when she recorded You Oughta Know and by covering it Hydrogen (still loving that miss-spelling) have manage to draw even more attention to how stale their own material is.

My advice is to ignore it and hope really hard that it goes away.