How To Destroy Angels - Welcome Oblivion

Last Updated on Thursday, 28 March 2013 16:02 Written by EvaLantsoght

Artist: How To Destroy Angels

Album: Welcome Oblivion

Label: Columbia Records

Genre: Post-industrial, Electronica, Alternative

After releasing An Omen a few months ago, How To Destroy Angels have now released Welcome Oblivion, their first full CD. How To Destroy Angels consist of fine folks Trent Reznor, his wife Mariqueen Maandig, as well as Rob Sheridan and Atticus Ross.

You can check out the review of An Omen here. Welcome Oblivion contains many tracks from An Omen but the sequence of tracks on the album has been given more thought. The tracks seem to flow effortlessly into each other.

The atmosphere that How To Destroy Angels create is a minimalist, blue, haunting, slightly uncomfortable and stinging type of atmosphere. It's edgy, in a sense that nothing flows, but everything seems to stop and go. Everything is made up of snippets, break-beats and counter-counts.

The vocals of Mariqueen go from eerie whispers to nonchalant, slightly bored-with-attitude lines, and fit very well into the weird, unsettling experience that How To Destroy Angels create in their music.

As I mentioned when reviewing An Omen, How To Destroy Angels is not Nine Inch Nails or anything like it just because Trent Reznor is in there. Different band, different project, different sound – just a little challenging to listen to them without being prejudiced about Trent being in there.

How To Destroy Angels borrows on Welcome Oblivion from a wide array of artists and musical styles: Massive Attack, Joy Division, Appalachian folk music, dubstep, Ludovico Einaudi and Kaftwerk are just some of the references.

Aside from the tracks that I discussed when reviewing An Omen, I would like to highlight a few more gems that can be found on Welcome Oblivion. First, there is “Welcome Oblivion” itself, that sounds like a panic-attack translated to music, expressed by frantic vocals.

The poppy “Too late, all gone” sounds familiar like many pop-songs, but contains the broken elements that mark the style of How To Destroy Angels so that it feels like a pop-song that was broken into pieces and then glued back together again, here and there missing some pieces and looking just not the same anymore.

“Strings and Attractors” is contains elements of bitpop, as well as a beautiful chorus that makes the listener almost long for Mariqueen to be liberated from whatever is imprisoning her in that track.

Welcome Oblivion makes more sense than An Omen in the way the album is structured. If you are looking for an album that provides you with an interesting listening experience, covering a wide array of musical genres, then do check out How To Destroy Angels.