Posted on: October 20, 2007 Posted by: James McQuiston Comments: 0

Monster In The Machine – Butterfly Pinned / 2007 Emotional Syphon / 12 Tracks / http://www.monsterinthemachine.com /

Pretty much anywhere an individual looks, Monster in the Machine has some sort of ties to legendary rock acts. The label that they are on, Emotional Syphon, is owned by Munky from Korn. Josh Freese (Vandals) and Doug Ardito (Crawford in Cellophane) are captured in different roles during the tracks on “Butterfly Pinned”. The leader of Monster in the Machine, Shannon Crawford, was once in the major label band Cellophane but has made quite a career for eirself painting (individuals like Lindsay Lohan and Jerry Stahl own some of Crawford’s work). “Butterfly Pinned” has a hell of a pedigree – can it impress?

“Fear of the Mind” is the opening track for “Butterfly Pinned”, and the resulting rock music sounds like a newer interpretation of a Pink Floyd. In fact, there is a more than passing comparison to be made to bands like Deadsy, Godhead, and Orgy during “Fear of the Mind”.  “Helicoptor” is a much more strung out and slower track – imagine the styles listed as contributing to “Fear of the Mind” mated with the Britpop genre of the middle to the late nineties. In much of the same way, the falsetto tones of “Perfect” have a comparable style to the later work of the Crash Test Dummies, while the instrumentation on the track screams 2000-era Modest Mouse. The different styles continue with “Under Your Shadow”, which has an indeterminate set of influences for the vocals while the guitars start up a wall of noise similar to that perfected by the Cure in their early eighties albums.

The eighties influence continues into “One Way Trip”, with the guitars taking on a mix of Def Leppard and the aforementioned  Cure. Each track on “Butterfly Pinned” seems to rest on a different set of influences and styles; Shannon Crawford and the rest of eir band succeed here where so many bands fail because they are able to instill a thread common to all 12 of the tracks onto the disc. The familiarity that individuals will have with the songs on “Butterfly Pinned” is due to the framework that Crawford and company build their tracks off of; rather than coming out as a band that rehashes other bands’ successes, they are able to put their own indelible stamp on everything they do.

Top Tracks: Helicoptor, One Way Trip

Rating: 6.0/10

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