Album Review: Aktor - Placebo

Take a journey inside the skull of a man who has tasted eternity. Relish his conscious mind, condensed into a capsule and laid upon your tongue. Chew lightly with the stone inside your head and swallow it down the well that travels between your ribs. Let his memories and emotions fill your veins like lightning. His will gripping the throttle of reality and forcing you through an accelerated tour of time and space. Driving towards metaphysical bedrock, like an anchor dropped in a crystal-clear pond cuts through the water. That man is Chris Black, or as you may know him professionally, Professor Black, and his tool of transcendence is Placebo.

Placebo is the second studio album by Black's retro-rock-futurist project Aktor. He is joined here once again by Jussi Lehtisalo and Tomi Leppänen of Circle and Pharaoh Overlord fame to assault your mind with sounds and visions not born of this dimension or timeline. Begining with the free-wheeling, steel-biting uplift of Black's Chicago based hard rock band High Spirits, Aktor improves on the musical science of modern-man by raising the long-dormant spirits who once served as muses for the likes of Blue Oyster Cult, Hawkwind, and Voivod, and capturing them in a sampling board so that they may be tickled and tortured band's leisure. The resulting cacophony of semaphore synths, high-flying amphetamine chords, and fog of electric-fire fête is so thoroughly drenched in the sweat of genius you'll swear it was produced by the ghost of Sandy Pearlman.

Let the electro-hiss and sneer of "The Ghost of Time" lift you to a place where you can confront the digital demiurge that plagues our age. After defeating the demon, slake your thirst in victory with a swig of star-light infused surf rock from the cool ripple pond of "Seeing Rocks in the Sky." When you're ready to kick some more ass, throw on the ordinal-headed speed metal of "Save Your From Me" and "Get Me Outta Here." And when you are finally willing to leave behind your flesh prison for good to allow your mind to explore the infinite folds of the universe, take what you have learned on this journey to open the laser-light gates of the lofty, polaris-poaching "Astronaut" and pass through the final threshold of the eccentric, circuit-board flooding fry, and cosmicly-operatic "Clean Machine." Aktor may call what they've prescribed to you a Placebo, but the side effects will pulverize your mind and liberate it from its fragile mortal casing.

Grab a copy of Placebo from Ektro Records here.