What a great cover. I say this because the cover is what led me to purchase this album in the first place. Which reminds me of a trick question: “When can you judge a book (or album) by its cover?” Answer: “When what you’re looking for is the cover.”

Unfortunately, the cover does not accurately reflect the music on the disk. The storm surge in the photograph is both beautiful and deadly, but the music inside is neither. One expects harsh atmospheres, menacing frequencies, unraveled drums. Instead, the beats border on the benign, especially on the MLK-sampling “Two Sides of the Bullet”. This is the nice side of industrial music.

Tympanik Audio has carved out a sizable niche of a once-deserted market, and for this, they should be credited. Not every release is as good as those of Totakeke (who remixes a track here), but each deserves attention. Lately, however, some of these – Surge included – have begun to suffer similar virus-like symptoms: too many tracks (75-minute albums packed with filler), a lack of the organic matter (electronic keyboards that sound synthetic), and sample anemia (percussion tracks that rely on a buried or single vocal sample for “meat”). A truly solid song doesn’t need a remix, but most Tympanik releases chuck in a few at the end, which often has the unintended effect of making the original artist look bad.

There are some fairly decent dance tracks on Surge, the best of these being “What We See Now", found both in its original form and in an Access to Arasaka remix. For the most part, the artist paints with a Planet Mu palette, but with the aforementioned industrial sheen. Lacking, however, are melodies to stick in one’s head, or breakdowns to excite a dance floor. While patterning is certainly crucial in tracks like these, sinew and soft tissue still need to be added. “Chrysanthemums for Carrion” almost gets it right, but the acoustic guitar sample is too bland and the synthetic violin too sparingly used to be effective.