Mega Drive – 200XAD
Mega Drive – 200XAD
FiXT
Release Date: 21/07/23
Running Time: 1:70:29
Review by Dark Juan
9/10
Good afternoon and welcome, from a man who has been banished from the bedroom and exiled to the lounge. This is because Mrs Dark Juan has decided she is wallpapering. Now, ordinarily I would do the painting while she is in a different part of the room, but Mrs Dark Juan has been irked by my presence and has made a mistake, so obviously it is all my fault. Even though I was merely reclining upon the bed talking about the tiny hellhound we are acquiring on Saturday. Hence, I have carried out a textbook tactical retreat, as has Hodgson Biological-Warfare, who has also learned that you don’t cross Mrs Dark Juan when she has an idea in her head, to the lounge whereupon I am having a lovely cup of tea.
Anyway, this fat 40-something (although less fat than previously because I have found an affordable new supply of Cholula Chipotle hot sauce, which is my favourite food item of all time and I am now shitting for Britain to an Olympic standard with commensurate Johnny Cash lyrics) is now relaxing upon his chaise-longue, having fired up the garishly spray-painted Platter Of Splatter™ and is currently giving the latest release from “cybernetic darksynth” artist Mega Drive (from Texas in the Lost Colonies of America) the dubious benefit of my attention.
Now, if you are (and I am sure there are at least two of you out there) a regular reader of my ranting, you will know that Dark Juan is a rabid and enthusiastic fan of Synthwave. This is all Gunship’s fault, as their neo-80s retro-futurism speared Dark Juan right between the eyes and did something unspeakable with Dark Juan’s pleasure centres, and subsequently Dark Juan will frequently slip off into the dimly lit, rainy alleys just off garishly neon-illuminated, heavily populated highways and lurk menacingly while he immerses himself in an electronic world that coruscates and tumbles and re-arranges itself around him. This is the world of Synthwave music – a percussive assault that reminds the listener of muscle-bound 80s action heroes slaughtering their way through battalions of near-future mercenaries, Soviets, or other generic bad guys, armed to the teeth with every single kind of NATO weaponry he can carry, an extremely improbable name, and quips that would make a seasoned dad joke practitioner think twice before uttering them. Synthwave is what John Carpenter thinks the world sounds like moments before it is immolated in nuclear fire. It is The Terminator in musical form. It is human muscle fibres and respiratory systems powering the advanced targeting systems of vast, armoured battlewagons…
This review has been temporarily paused because Mrs Dark Juan has just ripped her toe open on the stepladders. Be back soon…
Hello again, I have administered first aid and cleaned the carpets. Mrs Dark Juan is now adequately provisioned and although I offered to put Planes TV on YouTube on the television so she could watch the arrivals at the Royal International Air Tattoo, she declined this and has returned to wallpapering, albeit wearing footwear and some frankly fucking top-notch frontier first aid from your good correspondent this time.
Any instrumental Synth work such as “200XAD” is going to have to be compared with the leaders of the whole shebang – these being Carpenter Brut, Pertubator, Gunship, Lazerhawk, Power Glove and their ilk. An outlier who we will discard for the purposes of this review is MASTER BOOT RECORD as Victor Love is very much on a one-man mission to recreate Metal with electronics, rather than evoke retro-futuristic sounds and cityscapes. This is where Mega Drive excels – every piece of music on this album easily creates some cyberpunk adventure imagery in Dark Juan’s head: ‘Infrared Icon’ making the poor abused grey meat in Dark Juan’s cranium imagine a leather trench coat-clad protagonist breaking into a server farm in order to release nanobots into the datastream and take control of cyberspace from the evil zaibatsus and corporations slowly strangling online freedom, and ‘Arc Ascension’ soundtracking the hurried and illegal launch of an armed orbital combat shuttle, its flight through the atmosphere and a massive space battle around the Lagrange Point of a binary star system, where c-beams glitter and rake the ablative foam from the fuselage of the badly damaged shuttle whose only survival option is to pancake inside the shuttle bay of the Tannhauser Gate Space Station without permission and ranks of immaculately-uniformed space troopers train massively overpowered energy weapons on the exit door of the interloper while frantic communications and negotiations are carried out.
‘Threat Signal Loss’ is a different feeling altogether, being a stealthy crawl through stainless steel corridors, avoiding advanced detection systems and your infiltration team conferring with each other through their consensual neural network, their hardwired thought-projectors linking into each other as they send swarms of microdrones in front of them and rely on cybernetically- enhanced insects for advanced intelligence.
This is what Mega Drive does to me – it is superficially chromed and shiny and streamlined and painted in the brightest blues and yellows, but if you look closely, you can see the filler and the decay and the constant repairs that need to be made in order for whatever it is to function. Mega Drive’s music is a deep dive into the seedy underbelly of Synthwave – it’s a foray into the meat and cybernetic black markets in the alleys of the Shinjuku of Neo-Tokyo, looking for the latest in bio-neural and bionic enhancements so you can hotrod the living fuck out of your nervous system and musculature. It’s muscle amplification and neural targeting software pre-loaded with every tactical and strategic gambit known to humankind. It’s cyber geneticists selling you sheets of nitrogen-preserved, armoured sharkskin that has built in anti-rejection mechanisms that bonds to your inferior human meat. But it is also smoky love scenes with emotionally unavailable women in a high rise apartment that looks over a futuristic, polluted neon cityscape, the coldness of the woman driving you on to try and break through the icy reserve she has, but lovemaking is no longer just the physical act as neural symbionts link and render you more than just physically naked and you exchange data and increase sensation, pushing already overdriven nervous systems ever further even as you enter her…
Where Mega Drive differs from most Synthwave (which, to be fair is fracturing wildly into ever more obscure genres of its own, what with Darksynth, Dungeon Synth, Outrun, Vaporwave etc) is that this music is much darker than the rain-dripping-from-bright-pink-neon aesthetic of quite a lot of Synthwave. Mega Drive is sputtering fluorescent tubes and painfully emaciated desk jockeys on an endless search for data to sell to drug-addicted mnemonic information dealers, overflowing bottles of piss and ashtrays filled to the brim with cheap cigarette butt. The desk jockeys are hunted men who can’t leave their endless trawl for data as the nanite trackers they are infected with will instantly give away where they are as soon as they move beyond the heavily shielded rooms they inhabit, so they survive on nicotine, rotgut whiskey and junk food made with vat grown meats and seafood flesh.
The Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System awards Mega Drive 9/10 for a fucking amazing album that leads the listener on a retro-futuristic journey through a William Gibson-esque megacity hellscape that is only ever a single incident away from catastrophe. The album has that febrile, dangerous quality to it – of order on the ragged edge of transforming to chaos. A mark was deducted because it is not a Metal album although the more adventurous Metal listener will find much to enjoy here. Otherwise, Mega Drive deserves to be at the very top of the Synthwave pyramid with Carpenter Brut and the like.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Orion
02. Mnemonic Head Trip
03. Narc³
04. Persona Sync
05. Shadow Dancer
06. Multipass
07. Black Katana
08. Infrared Icon
09. Arc Ascension
10. Threat Signal Loss
11. Code Walker
12. Ctrl Alt Dissonance
13. METACURSE
14. Nakatomi Night Assault
15. Memoria
LINE-UP:
Mega Drive – Does fucking everything, mate.
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
