Megatrend: Let The Trend Be Your Friend
Downstream

Sporting what must be the most woeful title of the year, Megatrend's Let The Trend Be Your Friend is thankfully a whole lot more tolerable where it counts. His hour-long set of metal machine music distills elements taken from the broadest spectrum of styles—dub, ambient, electro, hip-hop, glitch, trance—into thirteen aggressive urban soundscapes. Moods are predictably extreme, ranging from the chill of “Selfega Arialis” to the psychotic seizures of “Liscargo Forleam,” and songs feature generous helpings of mechano rhythms, spooky themes, and crushing breaks. Throbbing cuts like “Gitard Servale” and the dubby “Pan Cordless Atronix” pulsate manically while glitchy meditations (“Paetches”) and space-dub explorations (“Rendenning”) offer relief from the dystopic intensity. Its synths writhing mercilessly, “Telfuego Nivarre” is the album's clanking industrial monster (it even works in a recurring reference to The Prodigy's “Firestarter”). What most distinguishes Megatrend's sound is his concentration on dub, not the style itself but its production techniques, many of which are applied liberally throughout. Under a more palatable title, it would be easy to imagine Megatrend's album appearing on Spezialmaterial or Highpoint Lowlife, both of whom have issued material of similarly aggressive electronic character (Solarium and Izu, respectively)—that fact alone a strong endorsement of the album's quality.

May 2006