Music Banter - The Monthly Music Trading Post

I know next to nothing about electronic music. Sure, I can pick out the influences in other music and recognize what it sounds like, but I don't differentiate between trance or techno. Thus, Duga sent me Infected Mushroom's Vicious Delicious, claiming it "has a ton of rock influence, so it is an easy transition." Wikipedia labels this as psychedelic trance (duga used this term as well), trip-hop and industrial (so, at least I know a little about one of those genres). Let's go.
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"Becoming Insane" starts off the album with some crazy guitar that sounds pretty cool. Then it goes straight into electronic mode with a robotic voice and a total electronic beat. The voice was annoying but some cool stuff starts going on around that guitar. At this point it devolves into a clash between some dance elements and the electronic stuff going on. Then some Spanish (I guess) vocals start going down, starting off filtered and progressing to a "standard" style. These were pretty good and went over the beat prett nicely. Then they got more high pitched again which took an adjustment, but still fit well. This album was described to me as something that had elements of rock in it, and this is where you hear it. It takes the arrangements of rock music and just crams in the electronic. Then a guitar started that I wasn't all that fond of - didn't like the tone of it. Didn't fit. Goes back to full-on electronic mode with some dude shouting "INSANE INSANE INSANE" over it. Not bad but definitely not as good as earlier in the song. It closes out with that sweet guitar from earlier, which is much appreciated. Overall the song alternates on quality for me, though I can't say how good or bad it is at any one point in time.
"Artillery" follows up with an electronically drenched hip-hop beat and a guitar I'm still not quite sure of. Then some guy starts rapping, and he's decent, but the beat is kind of boring. A cool filtered guitar (it sounds like) kicks in and that's all well-and-good, but I think me and Mr. Bad Hype Man are going to have a problem (WHAT! WHAT! WHAT!). Then the guitar kicks in after some terrible whispering and then I start reconsidering listening to this song at all. What an awful event at 1:55, truly tragic. I hear his mother passed out when she heard the news. I stomach the next 30 seconds and wait for something good to happen, and the by-comparison-amazing rapper comes back, but the beat still isn't listening to me. That goddamn guitar. Stop it. Some more whispering and then it's Return of the Spanish Guy. Then the truly sh‎ty portion kicks in again and I had to turn it off.
"Heavyweight" opens sinisterly (though not without some mood-ruining tape recorder sounds!) and then kicks in with the electronic. Then a dying cat with a piece of food caught in it's throat starts wailing and I made a "What the fu‎‎ck is this sh‎‎it?" face. Straight up, hand to what god you pray to. Then it got less bad but was still boring and the FU‎CKING GUITAR I DON'T LIKE IT. Sort of faded into the background here, to be honest. This is always what electronic music has done to me. I gave up on "Heavyweight" and skipped the next 5 minutes of the song in the hopes that my interest could be held.
"In Front of Me" opens with a neat beat and is then promptly ruined by the vocals. Blegh. At this point I suddenly felt like playing Torchlight since I never finished it, but no, stop that. You're listening to music (possible. HAWHAW!). Around the 1:11 mark it started getting worse so I skipped it again.
"Special Place" has a good opening beat (notice a theme here?) and then bad vocals. They stop quickly, though, so I'm free to enjoy the fu‎ck out of this beat which is pretty decent. It soon degrades, though, but it's still the best part of the song. Some energetic stuff going down here. This goes on for a while and then they start singing again and I'm eeeeehhhhhhhhhh. I took one for the team and let the song finish. The goddamn vocals, man. The goddamn vocals.
"Suliman" opens with a clipping beat and then some dou‎chebag starts singing "Scooby dabba doo" over it or some sh‎it. Can you tell I'm fed up with the album yet? I'm indifferent to this entire bloody genre, and this album is no exception. The 4:15 mark was kind of neat, with a nice guitar.

And this is where I stopped. Why? Because this has helped me come to the conclusion that I've been floating around in my head for a while. I can listen to individual electronic songs and think they're good or bad, but any more than that and I can't do it. Who knows why? I'll listen to the rest of these songs individually sometime and see what happens, yeh? I'd like to thank duga for helping me finally get a concrete opinion on electronic stuff in my mind. I don't hate this album, I just don't care about it.

10/15/10: In retrospect this review's entirely ignorant. While I still don't enjoy this album or electronic music really at all, it implies that I've stopped trying to find good electronic - I haven't. I'm not sure what state of mind I was in when writing this, but I don't like it. Let you, reader, know that I will never write off an entire genre, though I'll most definitely have pre-conceived notions of what to expect (perhaps that's what I was trying to state here).