Beyond Flatline

If you've been waiting for an album that contains a hooky song about tying woman to trees, photographing them, and uploading the results to the Internet, Seabound's Beyond Flatline is the sleazy and precious answer to your dark prayers. Similar to the '80s darkwave sound of Psyche or Secession, Seabound deliver their gloomy and obsessed lyrics over cinematic electronic landscapes and darling melodies. Sequencers bleep and bubble and there's barely any of the grit from the Skinny Puppy side of industrial dance. Whether or not the listener can stomach the melodramatic, melancholy, and lecherous subject matter will be the deciding factor. Besides "Digital"'s tale of pornography in the woods, you get the serial-killer-as-roommate story "Poisonous Friend" and a world-destruction dream in "Torch." Vocalist/lyricist Frank M. Spinath can string together some interesting couplets ("You are no scientist/You're not a amorist") and he really shines on the filth-around-the-world "Go International" ("South American poetry never worked for me/Italian pornography sometimes did"). Beyond Flatline is filled with songs that Hannibal Lecter could gleefully whistle while doing some housework.