Mukala's debut album is a half-baked concoction of synthesizers, looped drums, and restrained vocals. One of Essential Records' newest acts, Mukala's songs do, however, have strong topics, such as the illogicality of divine love, the deliberate excesses of free speech gone wild, and the two-way violation that control produces. To run into purposeful lyrics is particularly refreshing in an era of introspective songwriting. Musically, though, Fiction blurs into forty-five minutes of forgettable sameness. One standout is the melancholy minor key longing of the fifth track, but after several tracks, the loops begin to sound recycled, the synthesized motifs seem to have been cut and pasted from song to song, and the emotion
in Dan Mukala's vocals mimics a flat-lined EKG.
For easy listening and background music that blends into the decor, one would do fairly well with Mukala's Fiction, but if one is looking for music that grips and moves, that wells with intensity, look elsewhere. Fiction lacks a focus of emotion.
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Other coverage for this album
The Lighthouse Unsorted 1999Reviewed by Stacey Lee FeldmanThe definition of "modern" is always undergoing revision. Well, here's another way to call music modern - it's called Mukala (pronounced MUCK-a-la). Dan Mukala and company bring their debut, Fiction, into the ranks of the musically modern by toying with some of the concepts other groups have been playing with, like programming and sampling and backbeats, all acting as underpinnings to their…HM Magazine #74Reviewed by Brian Vincent McGovernFirst off, one thing I'll say about this record, it's got some nice variety and some refreshing songwriting. "Skip to the End," while remaining a clever song concept, is an irritatingly whimsical jaunt, made even more annoying by the fact that some cool Plumb style drum loops were put in and expected to fit well. But not all the songs are like that, though they do just about all have simple…Similar sounding releases
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