"PAIN Everlasting," more like!

Satyrblade

Hideous. Dammit, Sam - what the fuck were you thinking? I wasn't interested in the other tracks, but the preview cut of "Fortune Presents Gifts" sounded sweet, and I figured, "Hey, it's a DCD classic. How can they screw it up?" Sadly, I found out. Instead of a drifty female singer, we get WRETCHED vocals by way of Sam... not even the dreary old Sam of bygone Black Tape days (that much, I could have handled), but a cringe-worthy lounge-singer take on the song that gutted the instrumentation of its potential to save itself. Worse still, that vocal is multitracked, meaning that you get MANY LAYERS of Sam singing the song badly. As far the the other songs are concerned, a short listen to the bang-your-brainpan-against-a-tin-sink lyrics provides ample warning to their pretentiousness. Black Tape has ALWAYS been a melodramatic hand-wringer of a band, but they at least they used to do it well. No longer. Hate. Hate. Hate. Hate. Sam, dude, I want my .49 cents back!