This is a psychedelic hard rock album with catchy choruses, precise, crunchy riffs, and keyboards that sound like they're coming from inside your head. The sound is clear and the songs are airtight structures, not spaced-out dins. Vocals tunefully recite a stream of surreal images that make enough sense to give the impression of a story. That's all a prospective customer needs to know, but I'm still struggling to define exactly what makes Aktor so unique.
"He took familiar music and systematically played the wrong notes," I've heard said about Thelonious Monk. That statement also works as a description of Aktor's method. For example, the verse riff in "Gone Again" begins as a predictable "Holy Diver" offshoot. While the beat stays consistent, the power chords spell out an unusual melody: basically the first half of the major scale with the fourth note sharped to introduce "the Devil's note." You rarely hear this in popular music, let alone traditional hard rock/metal.
Aktor colors in hard rock templates with unexpected juxtapositions of melody. Without breaking form, the emotions portrayed can instantly shift from creeping dread to melancholy to sunny euphoria. Or to put it another way, every path through Paranoia's nightmare garden is familiar underfoot, but the sights, sounds, and smells are bewildering.
Chris Black seems uniquely qualified to give Aktor a coherent voice. He has a long track record of writing about multiple personality disorders, but whether we're talking Dawnbringer, Superchrist, or High Spirits, each project sticks to its discrete identity and narrow set of themes. Writing for Paranoia's amorphous variety of moods must have been a challenge. It's easy to imagine that songs like "Stop Fooling Around" and "Where Is Home" address frustration with locating the music's true center.
Many of the lyrics are vaguely familiar from Chris' other songs: isolation, extreme fatigue, messiah complexes, the endless highway passed down from Motorhead's "Keep Us on the Road," the creative process itself. I confess to being slightly disappointed, considering that some early Dawnbringer imagery matches Aktor's music every bit for sheer craziness. But ultimately, it's much more valuable that "heavy metal's last singer/songwriter" has forged a balance between the meaning of words and their sound as music. Considering the larger category of experimental psychedelic metal, with all its Mike Patton impressions and Neurosis-style aggro poetry slams, it is probably Chris' sensible approach that even makes Aktor a good idea. Experimental or not, their album is fun and highly addictive, worth interrupting AC/DC for several back-to-back listens on an all-night powerdrive.
