"Sing rage!" These words open up Homer's "Iliad" and, arguably, their utterance marks the beginning of Western culture as we know it. And yet, some 3,000 years later, we're still plunking down good money to hear people sing rage. Moreover, in music, the postures of rage have become the most convenient postures to assume, even when there really isn't so much to be angry about.

I think, secretly, a lot of people harbored science fiction hopes that the advent of electronic music would cure us of our emotional irresponsibility in modern music-- in other words, the hope that mechanized music would make the recourse to whine about love and scream about life would be less and less convenient. Mocket and I have come to display these naïve hopes pitifully unrealized.

Mocket's latest release, Pro Forma, is a dull marriage of punk aesthetics with digital hardcore and electronic noise. With the borrowed wrath of all these roots, you'd think that Mocket would be able to produce something, at the very least, unpleasant. But Pro Forma is not even intolerable, it is merely uninteresting. See, the strange thing is, Mocket's first two records, Bionic and Pearl Drops are so clearly steeped in post- punk and new wave that one feels obliged to question their motives in deciding to go electronic.

So Audrey Marrs sings riot grrl rage to a different kind of musical snarl: Casio bleeps, modulated blasts of scratchy noise, turntables, programmed and live beats, and the heavy riffing (Deep Purple's lawyers should listen to "Flyspeck" very carefully) of Matt Steinke's guitar. The formula remains pretty constant throughout the album. The vocals on some of the tracks, such as "Saturnalia," take on almost Germanic droning chant. Otherwise, it's just Marrs' standard pissed- off purr.

If one is cynical (and I frequently am), the temptation is to assume that this a shallow stab at musical relevance by throwing ill- produced electronic music into the punk rock mix. If one is not cynical, you can call it a spunkier Atari Teenage Riot with keen pop-punk sensibilities and a leadfoot on the electronics pedal. Either way, hardcore futurism isn't the antidote for rage we've been praying for. When will civilization learn?

-Brent S. Sirota