Album Review: Airbag - A Day At The Beach

Years back, before my colleague and I started this little corner of the internet of our own, I was the resident 'prog guy' at our former home. I suppose that came to be because I had a bit more patience, or maybe it was just because there were some great albums from Neal Morse and The Flower Kings coming out at the time. Whatever the case may be, the years since have seen me falling further and further out of love with prog, as whatever patience I once had has winnowed. Fifteen minute songs with long instrumental breaks no longer sound interesting to me, not that they ever particularly did. Prog needs to prove itself with me, and I'm not sure Airbag is the band to do that.

The six tracks making up this new record are long, with four of them clocking in between eight and ten minutes, and they are inspired by 80s electronica and New Wave. Neither one of those is a sound I'm fond of, so I was preparing for this to be a chore. I was right.

The opening track "Machines And Men" tries my patience before it can ever get going. The song opens with nearly two solid minutes of soft sounds building up before we get to the first hint of the song itself. Long songs need to justify their length; merely being long for the sake of being long isn't enough. Those two minutes are time that could have been trimmed with no loss to the song, because once it does get going, it's driven by soft electronic blips that don't have the energy to carry a four minute song, let alone a ten minute one. It's only in the chorus that there's any life at all, and that isn't enough to make the rest of the slow slog worth the time and effort.

That statement is true of the record as a whole, as well. Despite what the band says influenced this album, there are neither the icy tones of 80s electronic pop, nor the swirling energy of New Wave. Song after song, this album drags at a snail's pace, so quiet you have to strain to hear if there's something, anything going on in the music. It's long stretches of simple synth notes that never build to anything. It isn't trying to be, but it's a truly depressing album.

There's never anything close to a reason for why everything is dragged out as long as it is. This record does not need to be this long, waste this much time, suck the very life from my veins. What it sounds like is a band that bought some old synths, recorded themselves while they played around with the various settings, and then mistakenly put that out instead of the record they actually wrong. There really aren't any songs here, not in the traditional sense of structured bits of music you will remember. It's all washes of noise that are supposed to sound pretty, but they don't, even if that was enough. Which it isn't.

It's hard to say that an album where nothing happens can be so bad, but that's where I am. I feel cheated out of an hour I could have spent doing so many more productive or enjoyable things. I hope I can at least save you from the same fate.