Rachael Please (back away from the microphone).

When I was e-mailed by Rachael Please to review the record "The Hole At The End The Void", her third record since 2008, I didn't know what to expect. Now, admittedly, I'm not the biggest fan of Industrial music, however; when I review something, I base it on it's own merits, and not the merits or my enjoyment of it's genre. What I heard in the album's 17 tracks was, without a doubt, one of the most painful things I have heard in a long time.

The entire record was so distorted that I might have made out four or five words the whole time, and while I understand that that may be the route she's chosen to take with her music, as a listener, it's frustrating at best to hear non-commital mumbling. Most of the tracks simply sounded like beeps with a shriek of garbled vocals coming through here and there, it was unappealing and gave me a headache.

The LEAST offensive thing I heard was "The Day I Met The Devil", not that I cared for that song in the slightest, but at least I wasn't feeling that "jammed a Q-tip a little too far in my ear canal" feeling the entire time. The record bounces between "I need a fucking advil" and boring as hell with no gray area in between. The songs are either over-worked and under-mixed, or so boring that I forgot it was on. All of it was equally painful. In fact, my roommate Josh said: "I'd rather bite my thumb off and pass out from blood loss so I don't have to hear this anymore." No seriously, he said that as we googled images of kittens to help us make it through.



While I appreciate the effort that every band puts into their work, and as sure as I am that Rachael Please has a dedicated fan base, the music is just not my bag. In the slightest. To be perfectly honest, it pretty much sounds like a teenage garage band that just figured out how to use their pirated version of Pro Tools.

If I had to give it a rating, I would give it one and a half out of five stars. Or five exploded eardrums out of five...