Pitchfork

Like many great modern satirists, Negativland are often wrongly dismissed as a gimmick, and panned for taking on easy targets. Yet, only in a society as sarcasm-infected as ours is such a claim even comprehensible. With such subtle wit at the heart of their humor, there's no "easy"-- only targets for Negativland; just because a blind dude could take pot shots at Bono's ego from a hundred yards doesn't make U2 any less significant. The same holds for the band's 1997 release Dispepsi: relative simplicity or not, their withering antics are dead-on hilarious and corrosively incisive.

But one of the few crimes of which Negativland haven't been commonly accused-- one that seems to plague similar provocateurs-- is the heinous failing of style over substance. Rarely has the collective's methods prevented them from making a point. Of course, there's a first time for everything. Despite their best efforts, nothing on Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak is even half as interesting or poignant as the CD casing itself, and musically, the decision to focus on this album's mood and textures largely falls flat. Without a semblance of direction within the album itself, Deathsentences is emptier than Negativland's refrigerators.

Oh, but where to begin? See, the guys have packaged this disc inside a mock automobile owner's manual, the to-scale insert depicting numerous pieces of reclaimed wreckage, as well as written documents recovered from the wreckage, (ostensibly) pertaining to the victims of the accidents. Sometimes disturbing, sometimes touching, sometimes tragically mundane, these documents are the conceptual inspiration for the album artfully described by the band as "the destruction of [their] studio in an automobile accident". A concept so emotionally and atmospherically rich is far beyond simply a functional theme for an album, but it's a brilliant one, and in the hands of such expert found-sound manipulators, I expected stunning results.

I dove into the album hoping for readings and retellings of the victims' tales, and sad, stirring aural vignettes to match the desolation of the scenes depicted in the booklet (if only it could all be as exquisite as Richard Lyons' segment contribution for Ira Glass' "This American Life"). Negativland, evidently, had different intentions regarding Deathsentences, opting to allow their talents for subtlety to take the fore. There are no lyrics of any discernible sort contained on this disc, and indeed, the samples they include are so heavily glitched and echoed that they quickly become indistinct, leaving only hazy wonderings as to their origins. Done properly, such a simple approach could have served as a perfect corollary to the theme they had set for themselves, but this time, Negativland have been undone by their own vagueness.

Deathsentences is really a single track partitioned into twelve bite-sized cuts, and the album shares a single, murky atmosphere throughout. Those looking to plumb the depths to search for some link, some remotely tangible tie to the concept it allegedly promotes, will be disappointed. Occasionally, rumblings of distant snippets or soundbytes bubble to the surface from out of the submarine twilight, but their significance or purpose is never clear. Even with the printed subtext for these tracks firmly in mind, the claustrophobic soundscapes are impenetrable and formless, offering no insight at all to the intent-- a shocking departure for the boys from the Bay.

The only reason Deathsentences isn't a total wash is owed to the mildly interesting, but wholly generic, atmosphere of the album as a unit. A gentle air of mournfulness clings to it through the scattered, almost random sound collages. The creepy isolation produced is arguably a fulfillment of the fundamental idea-- but it's so obtuse, anyone could name a dozen bands that equally capture identical feelings of melancholy (albeit without the benefit of a flashy manual). The pervasive mood and rhythmless, glitch-driven complexity of the album make it at least somewhat enjoyable, if only as background music, but that's about the best that can be said for it. If only the album could stand up to its packaging, instead of just mysteriously implying some sense of content. After twenty years of insightful, reality-warping satire, outright mayhem, copyright infringement, and litigation, a band like Negativland is bound to run out of targets-- but even with such an immaculate concept, it seems that there's still an inadvertent butt to this non-joke. Shame that it has to be their audience.