The New Regime – Coup Review
The room is drenched in gloom and cigarette smoke. It’s raining outside. It’s days like this that make you wish for the world to stop spinning, for cars to stop revving, for noise to stop polluting your reality, for rain to fall harder… for music to never stop.
The laptop’s hooked up to the sound system. The candle’s burnt out. Black zippo lights up yet another cigarette. Inhale. Exhale. Press play… and turn the bloody volume up.
Ilan Rubin’s debut album Coup with his solo project The New Regime starts out with “The Collapse” and huge, almost overly-dramatic piano chords. Even though the first track doesn’t impress the hell out of me… I bloody like it for it’s gentle, not-over-the-top approach to distortion and pendulum-like rhythm. The vocal on this and all following tracks deserves some mentioning and appraisal.
The second track “Order Restored” starts off with a dark sounding synth (or maybe bass?) riff that is later backed up by a very sweet sounding guitar and energetic drums. The album in it’s entirety has this dark feel that’s very appealing and haunting at the same time. Kind of like staring into abyss and not being able nor wanting to look away.
Just listen to “Time Erase” and “Haunt My Mind” (my personal favourites), you’ll know what I mean. The first one makes your imagination run wild, picturing whatever it is you picture when you hear a piano like this.
“Haunt My Mind” quite literally haunts your mind in the most delicious way possible. First verse, crawling around your room ever so gently, fools you into thinking that the song will be somewhat mellow only to discharge a bullet of a chorus in your face which will definitely get stuck in your head, haunting your thoughts and screaming from the inside of your mind. Closer to the end there’s a metal-inspired bridge that will knock you into energy-induced coma (yeah, energy-induced coma, google it) and make you want to hit the re-play button as soon as the song ends.
Another song with a scarily appropriate title “Tap Dancing In The Minefield” makes you wonder how much thought was put into naming songs… No, seriously – track names really do mirror the melody/lyrical content/pace of songs on Coup. I personally find it fascinating because it shows that there was a lot of thought put into making this record. I mean, look at the artwork for fuck’s sake! How sweet is that?
All in all, The New Regime’s Coup is a beautifully produced record that has a lot of variety to satisfy the needs of pretty much every listener. And it does just that without forcing anything unto you. It can be a musical wallpaper but it can also be the cornerstone of your day’s foundation (emotional and otherwise).
Ilan Rubin, being a multi-instrumentalist, wrote and recorded every single note, chord change and vocal pattern himself and let me tell you something – that’s pretty impressive!
I’d give this record a solid 9 (with some songs getting 13), and now that Trent Reznor announced Ilan as Nine Inch Nails’ new drummer – I really hope that we’ll see another record from The New Regime some time in the future. And I’m talking near future…
The New Regime – Time Erase
The New Regime – Haunt My Mind
Tags: album
