Pink Panther Project – Intoxicating Embrace
Pink Panther Project – Intoxicating Embrace
Marian Whores/ The Circle Music
Release Date: 16.09.24
Running Time: 57:40
Review by Dark Juan
10/10
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.
Stop arguing.
Music should not have such a concept as a guilty secret. If you like a bit of Simon and Garfunkel when you don’t fancy the latest album by Mork or Winterfylleth or whoever, that’s fine. ‘The Sound Of Silence’ is one of the greatest songs ever written. As proven by David Draiman taking a bash at it, missing the point of it entirely and turning it into an ego fest beyond compare. It’s fucking hilarious. Anyway, there has always been much debate in the hallowed circles of Metal (normally by blokes of a certain age, to be sure) about just how Metal you are, and it is regarded by these fucknuggets that it is somehow a sin to listen to other things besides Metal.
Well, I cock a snook, thumb my nose at them and tell them to fuck right off, the judgemental twats. It is fine to like other things besides Metal. My own record collection covers everything from the most baroque of Classical, Gregorian chanting, Disco, 80s Electropop and Psychedelia through to the most extreme music possible, of which Metal is a very large part and I am METAL AS FUCK.
Now, I am a Metal kid until I die, but Dark Juan is very firmly a believer in being intrepid when it comes to music, and it is because of this that I write reviews about Electronic gems you might all miss on Ever-Metal.com in between the frequently rabid scrawlings about Metal bands I churn out. Also, Metal Mum Beth “Let Him Do What He Wants, It Keeps Him Out of Trouble” Morait pretty much lets me do what I want anyway. Because it allegedly keeps me out of trouble.
Seriously, though. The Metal fan is likely to have an interest in Industrial or Synthwave music as they are both unusual outcroppings from Metal that have grown from it and Gothic Rock and are frequently side projects of established musicians. See Shane Embury and Dark Sky Burial or Carpenter Brut. Hell, even Karl Willets of Memoriam has had a bash at Electronic music with H Drive Project. Dark Juan has had this interest in Industrial and EBM since the early 2000s when Combichrist exploded. It was Combichrist that did it for me. Them, and Suicide.
Yes, this review is all over the place. It’s because I just listened to Machine Mafia, and I am now hopped up to a dangerous and probably homicidal degree and I need to come down again. It is time I unleash the Platter of Splatter ™ upon you all once more. This time I have selected a group from good old London called Pink Panther Project for your reading pleasure and my critical listening…
Ah.
Now, that’s not the reaction I was expecting. Nor the music. But suddenly I am more than a little turned on…
Pink Panther Project offer us an unholy melding of classic European EBM, Synthwave and Electronic Industrial. Like Blutengel, Suicide Commando, Pzychobitch, Zombie Girl, Unter Null and Gunship having a PVC and leather-clad orgy under banks of blacklights while Cybergothic vampires open up flesh with silvered scalpels and sculpt it into beautiful but terrifying new shapes, suturing expertly when they have achieved the shape they want while blood trickles in runnels over alabaster flesh to be captured in solid silver vessels to be consumed when the vampiric meat artists complete their masterpieces. Arabesques with ill-suited limbs. The beautiful turned into something monstrous and the monstrous made gorgeous, while people amped up on all kinds of stimulants dance endlessly on a floor made of strobe lights and Dexedrine, eventually dropping when their overdriven hearts give out or dehydration takes them all to endless Synth soundscapes from Pertubator and God Module and Grendel. There is not a choice, they dance until they die, or they survive the night only to recover and do it again the night after. Only the strong survive and only the most committed come off the floor and into the booths, where their pale masters and mistresses await them, to carve them into art. Maybe then they will be displayed in the cages above the floor, plastic feeding tubes shoved crudely into veins and catheterised waste carried away for god knows what use, there they remain, unmoving, joints smashed and set at unnatural angles, unable to scream as their vocal chords have been removed and there, immobile and mounted, to serve one purpose and one purpose only.
They are now art.
Pardon me, but the music of Pink Panther Project has unleashed my imagination. Their combination of human sensuality in the form of the softly caressing vocals of Uela and uncompromising machine pummelling in the Electronic drums and unrelenting tempos have done something to my hypothalamus. PPP bring everything that was so groundbreaking and wonderful about the late 90s EBM scene, and drag it into the 21st century, and meld it with the musicality and eye for melody that Synthwave has. The tempos are all incredibly danceable, and there is a strong Gothic edge to the music, not in the sense of snakebite, taffeta and the Batcave, but more of curves hugged tightly with skin tight PVC or rubber, massive boots and a beautiful, flawless face enhanced by piercings, glimpsed fleetingly in a darkened club where there are strobe lights and dry ice, and you are already drunk and on your third tab of Dex. Their music is Industrial welded to Pop.
I fucking adore EBM, and have done for decades, and this album is a strong as fuck introduction into the form if you are a novice. They are a step away from the glorious, technicolour Electropop of Ayria, and a level below the extreme Electronic Goth of Blutengel, operating in a musical continuum that incorporates the talents of those two sets of performers and making this album something very fucking special indeed. It’s like a cross between Funker Vogt, Suicide Commando and the bleak Electronica of The Sisterhood. Every song is brilliant. The problem is I am struggling to give it 10/10, and I’ll hand over to the Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System to explain why…
Pink Panther Project aren’t Metal and Ever-Metal.com is a Heavy Metal website. Dark Juan also has STRICT rules about scoring bands that aren’t Metal… However, The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System is feeling particularly anti-establishment today and is going to award Pink Panther Project the full 10/10 because fuck the system, the horse it rode in on and everything else because no-one is the boss of The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System and at just short of an hour it’s a lot of album for the money as well!
TRACKLISTING:
01. Intoxicating Embrace
02. Pony’s Dream
03. Pink Panther Chronicles
04. At My Feet
05. Stolen Masterpiece
06. Warriors
07. Scream
08. Midnight Shadows
09. Morticia Addams
10. Electric Anxiety
11. Astral Vein
12. Murder In The Shadows
13. Untangled Theories
LINE-UP:
Uela – Vocals, lyrics
Alex K – Synth, programming
Ether Mu – Synth, machines, drums
LINKS:
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