Anthony Linell – Emerald Fluorescents

I was a rather dedicated Abdulla Rashim follower while he was s till releasing music on his eponymous label. Then, my interest waned, only to be reignited again once I heard the "Layers of reality" twelve inch which he released under his own name.
Natural progression, I went for the full length, and - long story short - was rather disappointed.
Perhaps my expectations were a little too high, given the quality and the standard of his output I knew from before, and the recently released "Alienation from Self" (which is even great imho), but as a whole, this is subpar.
Main issue is that all tracks are identical in that bland, lazy way. Through eight consecutive compositions, the same ticking beat is used to underpin a variation of the same singular theme in the exact same manner. Sure, I am all for hypnosis and depth, but when you have to flip the record over four times and listen to the same side yet again, purpose is lost fairly quickly.
AR can deliver the goods, no doubts about that, but this makes it look like the material presented here is a sound palette he used for cutting his straight-up techno teeth.

Thing is, this double pack goes nowhere. As an album it has everything but continuity and flow. It starts out like it might, but once I put the B side on as the A side was up, I realized we were back to square one. As far as diversity goes, zero points there too. I don't think the rhythmic structure underwent a change once. Same beat, same bass line, same programming, times eight.
Don't get me wrong, no track in particular suffers from any obvious defects, but as a whole, the album is heavily marred by the fact it sounds like it was literary patched together with a first aid techno emergency kit, containing six presets inside.
Any which one of the two 12" mentioned above contains more diversity, texture and punch than anything on display here.

Speaking of punch, or a lack of, if I could sum up this whole album, I would say it has a lot of on your marks and get set tunes, at best a couple of ready cuts, and zero go material.
Do not get misled by this effort though. The two follow-ups on the mighty Northern Electronics imprint are both hefty.

A professionally exercised demonstration of repetitive techno rhythms and chemical reactions.