60 Second Wipe Out
The sounds are louder, dirtier, heavier, faster, and noisier on Atari Teenage Riot's60 Second Wipe Out. But to what end? The screaming, faux-revolutionary,Baader Meinhof-like rants are just so much sonic wallpaper, akin to the bloody bleeps of aMortal Kombatvideo game. ATR's music began in 1992 as a ridiculously cartoonish, potentially exciting amalgam of hard-core punk rock, techno, and drum & bass. And while their music never lived up to its promised "revolution," that was not much of a surprise to anyone. It is a wonder, however, that this record is so completely unexciting, what with so much fast, high-decibeled noise swathed in the distorted boom-box aesthetic to which all Digital Hardcore records must submit. For all their radical rhetoric, ATR have merely demonstrated once again what we already learned from the likes ofMDCback in '83: louder and faster are most certainly not better.--Mike McGonigal