Long awaited EP is good but slightly disappointing
3
By WorldOfSuck
It's hard to believe that Dangerous Muse has been around for 13 years, and has just now released their first LP. Back when the project was a duo, they made quite a name for themselves in the gay club scene. However, the intervening decade was mostly quiet, with a few great songs dropping here and there. After teasing an LP for years, it's finally here... and it's a solid collection of dance pop. I'm happy that this is finally out, but I'm not happy that it's mostly just re-released and re-worked material that's several years old. I'm even less happy that the reworks are, for the most part, not improvements.
Most of the best songs in this collection were previously released in an EP entitled "RED" back in 2013. RED is no longer available, and the songs as presented here have been remixed, some of them siginificantly. "I Can't Help It," the standout from the earlier EP, has most of its quirky samples replaced with a guitar track, which might have been an improvement had the new mix not neutered the song's strong dance beat. "Mr. Strangelove" is missing its searing synthy intensity. These new versions are simply not as good. If you've never heard the RED release you might be nonethewiser, but you probably won't like the songs as much as if you did.
Overall the album has an issue with being overproduced. The songs lack punch, and the mixes rely a lot on effects and filtering that smooth out the sound quite a bit, but diminish the overall dancability. This is especially noticible on songs like "Electric Eternity", which has a melody somewhere, but the hooks are lost under a million layers of production. Other new tracks fare better: "Dagger" is a great piece of dance-pop reminicent of early 90s Duran Duran.
Once nice surprise is that two previously-unreleased cover songs, "Sex Dwarf" and "Girls Like You", which were from the band's appearance in the German film House of Boys, made it on here unscathed. These are the best tracks on the album and are well worth your time. I suspect that the rest of these songs have simply been kicking around for too long and got reworked too many times. This is a decent album, but would've been far better had the producers known when to quit.
