Without jumping to the conclusions that the band name and album title suggest, I'd wager, based solely on the music and lyrics, that Song of Zarathustra are good old-fashioned nihilists. Being nihilists, trying to find the perfect style of musical expression for themselves must have been a modern circumstance of Buridan's Ass. Equally appealing industrial goth and hardcore gave them no reason to choose one over the other. Factor in classic nihilistic hatred of everything-- including styles of music-- and you have a real conundrum. So rather than suffer from their indecision, as the ass did, they had one of those your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moments and opted to combine them.

Song of Zarathustra's recipe for imbuing this debut disc with their goth nihilism is to insert a lot of minor chord doom-n-gloom church organ breaks into some very straightforward Troubleman-style hardcore. When it's not goofy or expected, it works. How often is that? Move that decimal in the rating one position left, read it as a percentage, and you've got the idea. To their credit, the band is as tight as a chastity belt. Almost out of necessity, since they tear through their Hardcore fakebook time changes in tried and true fashion. Any miscues would stick out like sore thumbs. Of course, the polish of production is apparent and ready to cover-up any flubs.

Travis Vos' larynx-shredding singing is on par with the genre standard. If you've bought in to the hubris of the music, then lyrics like, "It makes perfect sense to me/ It's written on your head/ Fastened to the back of your eyes," or, "This static age has a name for its page of change/ And the headlines read: not even likely," should come as no surprise. Indeed, when the core is this hard, the vocals are only there for rhythm, anyway. Lyrics become no more than reading material, nonsensical or not.

The album begins promisingly with the fade-in of a slow, processional guitar and extravagant drums half-hiding insidious whispers. Suddenly, the march morphs into an organ stomping out minor scale intervals and Vos' palsied screech kicks down the door to a fairly intense terrorcore. The see-sawing chords take over, swelling to the bursting point, only to self-interrupt with more organic intrusions. When they're at their best, like on "Mess of Zero," the comparisons to Drive like Jehu don't seem so far-fetched.

But too much of the remainder is exactly that: remainder. Each song lacks the will to power to either distinguish itself from the other or make a convincing argument for this syncretism in the first place. The three-fingered keyboard approach gets old quickly, and the rage starts to suffer from Cry-Wolf Syndrome. Song of Zarathustra could be making all the terrifying noise in the world, but by the middle of the disc, it amounts to sound and fury. The intro/outro bookends attempt to give a coherent feel to the ten exercises in between. And to the band's credit, it does feel uniform. But not on account of a minute-long song fragment on the post- and anterior.

Still, if you like a little goth in your hardcore, take a chance on these pompous, Neitzschean-obsessed pale n' skinnies-- if for no other reason than your options are limited. Just make sure when you're all sweaty from the mosh pit that your mascara doesn't start running.

-John Dark