30 Denari – Kindly Plotting for Riot

As far as genres go, Dark Electro is one I like keeping an eye on. Yes, it is fairly camp and you have to put up with a high Dracula-feel, but when it’s done right, Dark Electro feels like a creepy dungeon rave with masks and hilarity. It’s a bit dumb, but can be extremely atmospheric, so when I saw a request to review 30 Denari, I got excited.

Not because I know this band – they are apparently brand new – but because their influences intrigued me. Bauhaus. Joy Division. Killing Joke! Yes, please. Little did I know that I was opening a door to the dark side of Dark Electro. Sadly, the result is not Black Electro. The result is unhappiness and boredom.

It’s band-aid ripping time and I hate that, so I’m just gonna go: Kindly Plotting For Riot is not a good representative of Dark Electro. In fact, this is everything Dark Electro shouldn’t be. I would contend that there’s not a single “good” song on this album and a as a whole, this thing is a mess. There. Done. Let’s address this album constructively, because whilst no single song works for me currently, there’s still moments where I think that these Italian metal and punk veterans could make a good album together.

But there’s a big, looming, terrifying issue that needs to be talked about first, and that is the vocals. I quite often have an issue with vocals. I don’t see them as necessary in the traditional sense in most metal as I’m rarely a fan of the lyrics, but I tend to find them an irreplaceable instrument, something that whilst not decipherable in real time, still adds atmosphere and flavour. The vocals on this album would add decent flavour if they just got removed.

Every single track on this album feels like it eventually sinks into the same pattern of atmospheric, fairly generic background music accompanying soaring, mildly mispronounced English (occasionally Italian) vocals with more than a bit too much tremolo. It’s a shaky nightmare that overshadows everything else and makes the album a grey muck. The vocalist can sing, but he cannot be the main feature on this type of album because his contributions become attention grabbing, not a dab of colour. And this type of singing fits poorly with Dark Electro and the result is a mess.

On the bright side, 30 Denari manages to construct a sound that is clearly “them”. I can hear a bit of Joy Division, I occasionally get a little whiff of Sisters of Mercy, but there’s also quite a lot of unintentional Gogol Bordello at play here. This last point is because of the vocals and the arrangements around them, but Gogol Bordello is very actively not what these guys are trying to be. So, they need to figure out who they want to be before doing anything more.

I am harping on about those bloody vocals now, but I need to drill this point, because sometimes, it only takes one element to ruin an album. It’s not bad technique, it’s a mismatch. A misunderstanding of what goes well within the genre. The music itself is quite intriguing, I can feel myself bopping up and down as I’m listening to it. There’s nuance, there’s atmosphere, there’s potential for a minimalistic gem, but not with the vocals as they currently are.

Dark Electro is about minimalism. It’s about introducing the right thing at the right time, adding a little twist to the spooky, Halloween-cheesyness you’ve got going and make people both laugh and dance. It’s campy, corny and not too serious. It’s the B-movie scene of the post-movement. 30 Denari has made it serious, preachy and about some kind of undecided social message. We start with a song about how hard it is to be part of the working class and we seemingly swing by all the possible, existential insecurities before we’re finally done. This album doesn’t have a direction, nor does the band.

30 Denari has work to do if they’re going to keep releasing music. I don’t think there’s anything to complain about vis-à-vis musical capability here, but it’s honestly hard to tell because, again: the vocals overshadow everything. Do the same album one more time, just without the vocals and see what comes out of that. Dark Electro needs to be funnier and more adventurous whilst still being a bit scary and foreboding, and all of that lies in the actual music. Let the music stay front and center. No one cares about your synth-playing if they’re trying not to listen to what’s being sung. I think the underlying tone and atmosphere might be there, but the vocals render that point irrelevant.