Guilty pleasure admission time. Orgy found a lot of playing time in my old truck’s Xplod system back in the high school days. So did KMFDM and Nine Inch Nails for that matter, but Orgy was the most prevalent of the bunch. Imagine my pleasure when I learned that Amir and Ryan of Orgy were the key components of Julien-K, a side project they’ve been working hard at since 2003.

Death to Analog is in every way imaginable the key to a time machine. Listening to this takes me back a decade or so. The differences between this and a typical Orgy album are nearly null and void, save the noticeable absence of Jay Gordon. This album feels like a product of that bygone era where Korn and Limp Bizkit ruled MTV and Orgy’s cover of New Order’s “Blue Monday” was lighting up the charts. Ostensibly, that’s where this music belongs. Its relevance to today’s popular music scene (yes, even the alternative niche scenes) is little to none. Perhaps though, it is its stick-to-itiveness to old conventions that makes this album oddly charming despite its many flaws.

Call me closed minded if you must, but I find much of this album lacking in complexity and depth. The song structure is the same song to song and the only variations come by way of the samples or lead synths used. Sometimes it’s moog, sometimes a saw, and sometimes a straight up filtered guitar, but it’s always the same: powerchord-like quarter-bar length notes that merely move the song along to its next part. Intro to verse to bridge to chorus and back again. Such is the nature of this type of music, but after six years of development, I would have hoped for something a little more revolutionary. Synth rock is great, but evolved synth rock, especially considering how far the industry has progressed the past decade, is at least hoped for, if not expected.

Ryan Shuck does his best Gordon impression here, but his range and power are just too limited to mimic his friend’s vox. His attempt is more effective when driving a song (choruses, bridges) but on verses, it’s mostly a failure. When it fails, I am horribly reminded of Culture Club. That’s right, Culture Club. We’ll just leave it at that for now.

This is all not to say that the album is bad. For those of us who like dark trance/industrial infused rock, Death to Analog is a fresh revival of a genre that is, for better or worse, currently very stagnant. Julien-K shows that there is still a viable avenue for synth rock and offers a glimpse at what may be in the recently-revived Orgy’s future.

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