73 minutes, 14 seconds

Prayer Tower
Halo

Regular readers of this blog (ha! I crack myself up sometimes) will recall that I wrote about Prayer Tower in an earlier post about Angels & Agony. I was trying (straining?) to make the point that Futurepop and its modern-day practitioners might owe a debt to bands like Prayer Tower, who were doing something similar almost a decade earlier. So it was interesting to get to listen to PT again in that light and see if I still felt that way. (The trouble with listening to CDs the way I do is that you really only get to hear a given album once a year. Such is the price of mild OCD.)

Anyway, Robert Weston's vocal style is more distorted than I remember--not Agonoize-distorted, but more like Bill Leeb's vocals on some of the softer songs from Front Line Assembly's Tactical Neural Implant. So was I too hasty in my original comments? I think it depends how rigid your definition of Futurepop is. I hear a vast difference between, say, Apoptygma Berzerk and Lost Signal. Or between Assemblage 23 and Seabound. The vocals and musical styles are so varied. The one common denominator seems to be that these bands take a harder-edged "industrial" sound and marry it to synthpop-inflected vocals.

By that definition, and despite the slight distortion in their vocals, I think PT showed--much earlier than those other bands--proof of concept. They probably weren't the only ones, either--remember Manufacture? And there were probably at least a dozen others.

So what makes something "Futurepop"? Is there another element I'm omitting--something in the lyrics? Why is it considered a distinct movement? What is (or was) truly "new" about it? Comments welcome.

Also: What ever happened to Weston? This was PT's one and only CD release, and then they seemed to disappear. Anyone know?

Also today:

73:13 Steve Roach, Midnight Moon
73:12 Electro Synthetic Rebellion, Corroded Fragments
73:12 Steve Roach, Atmospheric Conditions
73:11 Seelenkrank, Engelsschrei
73:08 Mentallo and the Fixer, Continuum
73:07 Klinik, Time
73:06 Allerseelen, Gotos=Kalanda
73:06 Dark Sanctuary, L'Être Las--l'Envers du Miroir
73:05 Vidna Obmana, Refined on Gentle Clouds