Armin Van Buren

I’d like to imagine a world where, after listening to what I will reluctantly call ‘music’, I didn’t feel like I needed to scrub my brain with sand. I’d like to imagine a world where music doesn’t feel like someone stuffed your ears with a paste composed of pulverized sorority girls, hair gel, and cheap knock-off cologne. I’d like to imagine a world where dance music didn’t bear a passing resemblance to Chinese water torture ( Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa, drip-drip-drip).

In short, I’d like to imagine I never had to listen to this album.

Before I even spun the disc, things looked bleak. The white silhouette of a man holding his headphones mellifluously aloft against a black background smacks of melodrama and self-importance, let alone the obvious crafty marketing ploy that screams, “Do you have an iPod? Then you need this album! It looks just the iPod ads! You are all vacant pop-culture receptacles pliable enough to be manipulated by familiar images on the sides of buses! BUY YOURS TODAY!”

Armin wears his headphones to the grocery store in the hopes that the cashier asks him what he does for a living, I just know it.

Perhaps I’m being unfair, but the world is becoming more and more a place of finite resources, and I’d like to slap the person who decided that they should be spent funneling this crap over the airwaves. And on that note, I do have a job to do, and so I must, sadly, address the ‘music’. I’ll try and stretch this out as long as possible, in the spirit of taking one for the team, but forgive me if I duck out early to retch.

The opening track starts off with what I immediately recognize as copped from the lift-off sequence from “The Final Countdown, via the band Europe from the ’80s. It soon rolls over to its signature style: cheesy electronica beats overlaid with washed out Casio synthesizer a la A Flock of Seagulls for more or less the duration of the album. Now, I’m just fine with a little retro for entertainment’s sake, but good lord, please do not frame it as if A) you are serious and B) you are original. I can only assume Armin has spent the last two decades in a small German hamlet connected to the outside world only via Morse code, and was, of course, the resident DJ, such is this tawdry set of hair-mousse beats. It’s repetitive, aggravating, and suited only for the military, as they have begun using music of the same ilk to grate on the psyches of insurgents, in hopes of wearing them down/flushing them out.

The lyrics are similarly generic and maudlin, redolent of the poetry contributions in Reader’s Digest. Not mention repetitive. Did I mention they were repetitive? They repeat them. Over and over, with the repeating.

Was that Brittany Spears I just heard? I had no idea she was even alive during the ’80s.

Admittedly, I am fickle about the electronica I like – most of it is of the twisted sort, strains you won’t hear at your local club. Still, I fully understand people’s need for a simple beat, a template to shake your booty to, to socialize, to check out members of whatever gender aligns with your sexual preference. This should really be a neutral experience, however – the music should serve as a backdrop, not as a ham-fisted attempt to proclaim, “We are here, and we are subpar!”

In Armin’s own words, “It’s unforgivable.”

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