RagMag
Recording Artist Guild Digital Magazine
An ambient and boundless alt pop and rock opus of an album was recently released from the band Collide and it breeds an absolutely refreshing set of textures that blend and chop into each other giving everything a darkened disquietude but also this vitality that helps the songs build a fierce but flowing character.
The Notes from The Universe album is completely immense, and these songs have the feel of connecting together almost like a concept album would.
You get such a great combination of natural and digital instrumentation that create an atmosphere that has a way of wrapping itself around you and keeping you right where it wants you.
You have some real gems throughout the records playthrough that possess this pop sensibility which is also there a lot on this release.
But even still if you look at this like it is a concept album, you're better off.
The vocals across the record have this graceful tonality to them and it really helps the whole approach for the soundscape and style that they've built.
There are plenty of surprises lurking around the corners and levels of intensity that rise and fall so the songs have a way of feeling alive and breathing.
What's most impressive about this really is the arrangement and songwriting and how the performance of the songs is the glue that keeps everything together and forward moving.
These are incredibly pictorial as well a lot of the time, which is quite beautiful in its own right, but they never lose that touch of grit and sharpness.
"Typically, I love to listen to a song for the very first time and just let whatever flows out. Then it will take a while to take shape and to finally get somewhere that I like where it is going. I wish it was easy—it is easy to sing to anything—but to get something that I love is hard. I get bored very easily and can write 10 or more different songs until I am even ready to share something with Statik." says songwriter and vocalist kaRIN about gaining inspiration to write new material.
Notable songs include "Freak Like Me", Haunting Me Still, and "Are You Better Now" among others of course.
There is no one like Collide. Their music defies categorization, and that’s an excellent sign of great art. I’ve heard all sorts of musical styles in their sound over the decades I’ve been listening to them: industrial, trip hop, darkwave, jazz, middle eastern music. Over the course of six albums (not counting some excellent remix albums and a great cover album) of all original songs, they have crafted a very diverse catalog, But Notes From The Universe stands above them all as their most unique, dynamic, and complex album yet.
“Stardust” sounds absolutely cinematic, like if Hans Zimmer collaborated with The Crystal Method. The album’s first single, “Are You Better Now?” — Reminds me a lot of Curve around the time of their album Gift. “Turn Off Your TV” delves into the agenda-ridden psychological programming that’s driving people crazy these days, saying, “Why don’t you turn off your TV? It’s always trying to sell you something.”
“Haunting Me Still” is a remarkable hybrid of industrial and middle eastern music that is just flat-out awesome.
“What Were You Thinking” is a really cool hybrid of trip-hop, goth, and industrial.
“Freak Like Me,” with its fuzzy ambient trip-hop melodies, is my favorite song on the album.
Frankly, I’m reaching for descriptions of these awesome songs to attempt to give you some idea of their sound, and i don’t think I come close. There’s so much to immerse yourself in and so much going on in the compositions that it really is futile trying to compare them to anything or anyone. Between Statik’s incredible blend of music and kaRIN’s mesmerizing vocals, you have a highly unique musical experience that you really shouldn’t miss.- Rob Jones
Buzz Slayers Blog
A fresh album release from Collide brings out a dark edge alternative rock cinematic universe that has a way of swelling and swimming around you as you soak it in.
Notes From the Universe is absolutely massive, and each song has a way of standing on its own two legs but the entire album as a whole feels like a concept record that once it's ended, gives you the same feeling you get when you watch an epic film and I've just walked back out of the theater to the outside world.
This record has all kinds of synth pads and electronic backing that gives it that theatrical undertone but also captures heaviness in a late 90s underground alternative rock type of way.
It's awesome to hear beautifully performed and almost haunting vocals laid on top such a massive and vast soundscape. It all makes perfect sense, and the textures blend together seamlessly.
One of the coolest things about this album is that you really don't know what to expect next from track to track and having that understanding of the unexpected is something that really helps the album stay as alluring as it does.
This record has layers to it and it's really actually quite fun to peel back those layers and see what lies beneath everything and there is something there.
The album as a whole has some great guitar work that's used as a form of expansion and gives the songs an even bigger and more vast feeling and tonality which really works for the vibe of the entire thing.
The other thing is that this record is super fun because they do tell stories and they do it in such a sort of dramatic and Theatrical sense that you can see some of them being a part of a scene of a play for example.
A lot of this album takes you to different places and different worlds and going on this musical Journey is really enticing and when you come out of it you kind of have to get your footing again and shake it off.
This is an amazing form of escapism and I love albums that do things like that for you because you don't come across them all that often but Collide pulls this off without a hitch.
ReGen Magazine
Although the band has hardly kept quiet in the interim with reissues and the “Are You Listening?” collaborative single, it had been four years since Statik and kaRIN had graced their audience with a full-length album of new Collide material. Perhaps it was this long wait that accounts for the 11 tracks on Notes From the Universe, which present some of the band’s densest and most notably robust production values yet. Elements of ‘60s blues-laden psychedelia can be felt in the sharpened rays of light guitar and organ that resound in “Turn Off Your TV,” or in the grinding grooves or “Are You Better Now?,” while later cuts like the jaunty “Icy Cold,” the swinging lounge jazz vibes of “When All You Crave,” or the sultry cabaret rhythms of the smoky “What Were You Thinking” demonstrate the fuller extent of Collide’s variety of influences, all filtered through Statik’s fierce layers of sophisticated electronics and splashes of organic sounds like guitar and piano. We even get a mangled bebop energy in “Gets to the Heart,” the distortion doing little to dissuade from an inherent pop catchiness, and probably the closest Collide has ever come to truly sounding like Curve. A song like “I Go Crashing” is especially entrancing, if somber, as jangly strums of acoustic guitar mingle with swirling waves of ambient pads, while the martial percussion and icy trickles of guitar eventually give rise to overdriven drums and malfunctioning sequences in the opening “Stardust.” All the while, kaRIN’s breathy and melodious voice remains as seductive and serpentine as ever, always balancing between a vulnerable chanteuse and a mischievous temptress, aided by no small amount of reverb and other minor effects for occasional emphasis.
However, much of Notes From the Universe tends to linger precariously close to the point of excess; songs lasting nearly six or seven minutes are not a new thing for the duo, but there is such a superfluity of lengthy repetitions that one might wonder if Statik and kaRIN are trying to make up for the long absence. “Freak Like Me” is a prime example of this, with the song virtually a complete work by the time three-and-a-half minutes have elapsed… but that’s only the first half of the song, and while the corroded bass tone and washes of feedback in the bridge and the arpeggios and vocal effects of the coda are enticing on their own, there is an almost anticlimactic disconnect that occurs. This applies to every song on the album, but this isn’t to say that Notes From the Universe is in any way tiresome; on the contrary, in fact, much of the band’s appeal over the years has been in how they allow songs to breathe and progress as they will. Ultimately, Notes From the Universe delivers all you could expect from a Collide record, and just a little more – such generosity from a band is deserving of gratitude.
A Model of Control
(Coming in at #19 on A Model of Control’s top 50 albums of 2022)
The ever-remarkable Collide – a duo that aside from one release back in the nineties, have remained fiercely independent all the way – returned in 2022 with their ninth album, and it felt a little like recent diversions into remastering and re-releasing their two best-known (and much-loved) albums in the meantime had given them renewed fire. There’s not too much in the way of reinvention here, mind – why fuck with a formula that works so well? – but what they do here is build on what they’ve done. It goes without saying that the production is exquisite in detail, with an awesome depth to the mix, and kaRIN’s vocals have that lovely, ethereal quality of old, but able to bite back where needed. Their goth-darkwave-industrial hybrid sound remains rather unique, too, but here they let songs stretch out a bit more than they’ve done in the past (eleven songs in sixty-four minutes), without losing a laser-focus such as on the scorching, guitar-led Are You Better Now? that remains the highlight of the album. Missed out on their recent material? Dive back in here, you won’t regret it.
Side Line
Format: Digital, CD + 2CD.
Background/Info: kaRIN and Statik set up Collide in 1992. Thirty years later they unleash their eleventh studio album in history. It also is the American band’s first self-released opus.
Content: This new work by Collide takes off a rather bombastic and Industrial-Pop driven style featuring kaRIN’s angelic timbre of voice on top. It’s quite representative for the rest of the work although the album gets progressively more refined, dreamy and Pop-like.
+ + + : Collide deals with a kind of dreamy, sensual and yet heavy sound. The album is progressively growing, the best songs being in the second part. The writing is sophisticated and deals with a very personal sound. It’s not that easy to define but this intimate sound makes the particularity of Collide. I recommend listening to “Haunting Me Still” for its sensual touch and “I Go Crashing” which is a superb last dreamy and even Cinematic-like cut with a hypnotic effect.
Best songs: “I Go Crashing”, “Haunting Me Still”, “Freak Like Me”.