Source: Album Artwork
For those needing to be caught up to date, Blaqk Audio is the side-project of AFI members Davey Havok and Jade Puget. Two men who, it’s safe to say, have made some damn fine music in the past.
However, in a world where we have already had one mind-blowing dark electro-pop album released as a side project in Greg Puciato‘s incredible release with The Black Queen – Fever Daydream, do we need another one released by someone from our world? The answer is: not if it’s this.
At best Kobalt is a pale imitation of the interesting, engaging, genuinely well-written work we found on Fever Daydream. At worst it’s the soundtrack to a scene set in the basement of a seedy Berlin dive-bar in a low-budget action movie (see ‘Waiting To Be Told‘ and ‘Curious Friends‘). Much of the album is uninspiring, falling back on thudding electro beats and plippy-ploppy synths that sound like a drowning duck being fed through a synthesiser.
Without Havok’s undeniable vocals this album would be fit only to lift a few tracks off to play at the end of a messy night in a club in Ibiza after you’ve run out of Avicci to play. Luckily we do have Havok’s voice, which manages to make an otherwise pretty dire album somewhat bearable. But even then it feels like a lot of the bite has gone from his delivery – gone are the malicious, ice-cold cuts of AFI to be replaced by something much more inoffensive, much more “marketable” which in turn just makes it worse.
If you like Daft Punk there’s an outside chance you might like this. If you like Basshunter you might find something to enjoy. If you like your songs to only have one beat throughout and your synth lines to come from a disappointing My Little Pony game then you’ll probably love this. Who knows, maybe this was just done because Havok and Puget needed to get it out of their system before they could write another stellar AFI album. But this should not be their legacy.
