Atari Teenage Riot – Is This Hyperreal?

In the entire history of alternative music has there ever been anyone with as retarded a sense of irony as Alec Empire? It's a question you'll find yourself returning to again and again as you listen to Is This Hyperreal? – an album so mired in rhetoric and witless polemic it could easily pass as satire. Of course Empire has pulled off this sort of humourless sub-cyberpunk sloganeering before, but back in the day (as on 2002's Intelligence and Sacrifice – in retrospect his undisputed masterpiece) he managed to augment it with an astute pop sensibility, ingenious production and some convincingly authentic-sounding nihilism. Is This Hyperreal? is largely toothless in comparison; creatively moribund and with all the perspicacity of a radicalised Forrest Gump. These fractious times are crying out for a political album of real substance and energy, but Christ-knows this isn't it. [Mark Shukla]