Pure Reason Revolution - Amor Vincit Omnia
Superball Music, 2009
I’d be lying if I said I’d been rooting for something different when PRR announced they’d started work on their second album. The soaring guitar riffs and monumental chorals of their debut, The Dark Third, had left me begging for more, and no amount of EPs and bonus tracks could satiate my hunger; at the same time, I was still reeling from the electro-prog vastness of the MySpace demo known as Deus ex Machina. I pounced on the album as soon as it appeared and immediately faced a problem. I mean it’s funky, it’s cool, it’s electro, it’s full of PRR’s signature vocal harmonies, it has a few hardcore riffs. So why am I feeling disappointed?
I’d compare this album to what you get when a fantasy novelist sits down to write sci-fi. ‘This’ll be a piece of cake,’ he thinks. ‘Sci-fi is just fantasy with computers.’ Allow me to clarify: no, it’s not. While fantasy allows you to do anything you like and requires no explanation, sci-fi requires a little something called cognitive extrapolation. In short, sci-fi must be at the very minimum vaguely plausible. You can’t just have robo-wizards casting mass-kill spells without grounding it in scientific theory, or at least scientific speculation. This, I believe, is what had eluded PRR as they recorded Amor Vincit Omnia. You can’t take a rock-opera frame, strip it of rock and stuff it with synths and expect it will sound plausible.
However, this album does do one thing with meticulous precision. It brings to PRR’s recorded work the quality that makes them sound feeble live: trying too hard. While The Dark Third sounds alive and fresh, Amor Vincit Omnia sounds strained, forced, perhaps trying to be something it isn’t.
Three llamas. For not ruining Deus ex Machina.
Reviewed by Llama
Track List
1. Les Malheurs
2. Victorious Cupid
3. Keep Me Sane/Insane
4. Apogee/Requiem for the Lovers
5. Deus ex Machina
6. Bloodless
7. Disconnect
8. The Gloaming
9. AVO
