Lullaby Land
by Vampire Rodents

Sounds like Zappa mouth raped Trent Reznor, shot a mutated semen load into his belly, and laughed a few weeks later as he watched Mr. NIN shit out this strangely awesome brood. Great album. (Edited)

If Cop Shoot Cop expressed consumerist hatred through a rhythmic but bungled blues, and Ministry the man-made horrors of today through intense walls of rhythm and distortion, then the Vampire Rodents captured all of this culminated ressentiment of the industrial era in what is perhaps one of the most original compositional formats in the history of popular music.

Truly, The Vampire Rodents remain the most unique act of the decade and the industrial era by far. A sample based sound that was always idiosyncratic but grew more and more dense and complex over time. This complexity and density in the compositions was for the first time achieved and also perfected right here, in Lullaby Land.

Despite the aforementioned, their music is not in the archetypical progressive or jazz style. In fact, it stems from a tradition that thrived on simplicity and repetition for practical purposes (early Hip Hop and Rave music) but they manage to overcome this by essentially "sampling themselves".
Meaning, they played most of everything here and in a cubist fashion repurposed and reassembled everything using techniques from electronic music.

All the songs offer a steady machine rhythm that is quickly subverted by all the sampled phrases and string sequences and riffs that all blur the lines between the functionality of the arrangements, the counterpoint, the harmony and the leading and vocal melodies by constantly interchanging them throughout.

Even with the originality in mind, one can still recognise their influences with the most obvious perhaps being Ministry and Skinny Puppy, particularly in the riffs and the electronic sequences, with the homophonic/leading cello parts taking after post-ww2 timbre-based movements. However, the pieces themselves become impressive simply by the way of their unique arranging and mood achieved through the dizzy collages.

Anyway, this contrast of the steady (hip hop) rhythms and the way the other phrases almost symphonically react to and contrast each other, makes their music sound like a hybrid of a living organism and a rigid machine.
This is, in the end, the pathos their music expresses in its core - to rebel against the existential anguish in an industrial system in any profound way, one himself becomes another cog in the self-feeding-self-oiling machine. It thrives on hate and fear as much as it does on satisfaction and stupidity and it makes them condition one another. Poignant but powerful.

Now, the album is not fillereless, but like 85% of it is the best thing ever. That being said though...the whole is somehow still better than the sum of its parts i.e. I always listen to it in full. Recommended, obviously, a MUST have in fact. Arguably the best of the decade and among the best of all times.

Best Song: Catacomb

From MadhattanJack 12/12/2025 00:41 | #312102 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

Frankly, for a lot of people, and even many avant-rock fans, this is going to be unlistenable. It's basically chaotic post-punk/hip-hop plunderphonics, or as the band puts it, "collage music." It's both fascinating and headache-inducing at the same time, though the primary headache-contributor is actually the band's insistence on distorting the carnival-horrorshow vocals on pretty much every non-instrumental track. It also doesn't let up - there are no "pretty" songs here, and the closest thing to a "break" for the listener doesn't come along until track 13, "Akrotiri." (Note that the Bandcamp version of the album moves that track, and most of the other instrumentals, even further back in the track order.) Nevertheless, it still adds up to a creative triumph, years ahead of its time, and almost certainly this band's best album. You might never want to hear it again after the first time, but you should probably hear it at least once. (Edited)

From Norman Bates 12/10/2013 16:23 | #97108

No: it's not for me.