’m so glad the Nazis lost the Big One or else we would have to, on a regular basis, suffer this brand of robotic, purebred, quasi-musical geometry. Although this isn’t even complicated geometry—it’s like an inferior piece of machinery that can’t get past the first level of Tetris, yet feels compelled to keep replaying the same unchallenging, slow-paced round over and over again. It’s also not the actual Tetris that’s automatically looping here; it’s some generic knock-off with inferior graphics and crappy music. Bad video-game music is closer to Fictional’s sound than any other negative description—in fact, it’s giving too much credit to say Fictional has “a sound”. There’s not one programmed drum-line, one programmed synth-line, or one uninspired vocal on Fiction that I haven’t heard somewhere before and at its worst, slightly better. I suppose from the album artwork and their cold, mechanical “sound”, they consider themselves futurists. Too bad for them Kraftwerk had already done it—and with a bit of wit—back in the 1970s. And Depeche Mode filled in the rest of the Fictional blanks back in the 1980s. I wonder: How futuristic is a band, when they’re just biting off what’s already been done before? I always thought the future was largely unknown; but everything on Fiction is dreadfully familiar and moreover, played-out. Hackneyed futurism—ye Gods! This is some prosaic shit! And make no mistake, sugar lips—we are talking about shit here! Processed, unimaginative, Clear Store Brand after Clear Pepsi after Clear Coke shit. It’s not even bad in a remotely interesting way—like when an artist makes an artistic wrong turn and ends up overturned in a collision of embarrassment. No. This is simply an audible yawn, a shitty blah.


The two Nazi robots that made this sonic waste-of-time are named Gerrit Thomas and Jason Bainbridge and they appear on the back cover like they’re posing for a Depeche Mode look-alike contest. Perhaps if they spent less time going to the hair-salon and more time studying the progressive arc of modern music, they may have realized how unnecessary their tired material was. Probably not though. After all, we are dealing with robots—and robots only know what’s been programmed into them. New sounds: Does not compute. New aesthetic: Does not compute: Human emotion: Does not compute. Any redeeming quality: Does not compute. What does compute for Fictional is a narrow-minded view of what techno is supposed to...um, seem like—not sound like, because there are no sounds; just the pretense of a techno act: Clinical, austere, gloomy, futuristic in a dated Blade Runner manner and nothing whatsoever to distinguish it—apart from silence, which is most welcomed after a listen to this robo-rubbish. I guess if you can say one good thing about Fiction, it really does give nothingness a kick.