Welcome Reality (Deluxe Edition)

Nero also know what is going to happen to us all

Amidst performers of most various kinds of music, there regularly emerge those who take responsibility fir predicting the future of mankind. In most cases, tomorrow is pained all black. We are doomed for a global calamity and we are the ones to blame. The techno-electronic masters Nero present their debut album that lays out their own version of the inevitable catastrophe. Nero are a very young duo from London formed by Daniel Stephens and Joe Ray. These men are presently working with a label owned by another electronic dance music act, Chase & Status. The newcomers decided to make it big time and prepared not just a conceptual album about an end of the world, but an immense compilation of twenty tracks lasting over a hundred minutes! The long player is titled Welcome Reality, and, judging by how eagerly it was anticipated, the release is going to be one big event for all fans of club music.

Hard to follow the story, impossible to turn the music off

The entire music bulk of Welcome Reality stands confidently on the foundation of the incredibly popular today dubstep, that crawled in the underground just five years ago, and Drum’n’Bass. The combination of the two enabled the duo to charge their music with a gloomy feel and heavy basses on the one hand, and endow it with necessary amount of tunes ad hit-like effect on the other hand. Speaking about hits, we must mention that, before the release of the long player, Nero dropped four singles, one by one, Innocence, Me & You, Guilt, and Promises, each, of course, present on the album. These tracks, highly appraised by the critics, shaped up stylistic rails along which the rest of the record proceeds. Everything here seems to fit the atmosphere of the approaching chaos and looks much like a well-written soundtrack to another disaster movie. In the beginnings, we have a two-minute intro marking the year of the big problem (2808), and then comes Doomsday, applying the whole range of classic features, like a voice in the background, depressive sounds of rain, and string samples for pending doom effect. Frankly speaking, as the albums draws near to its end, the music has less and less to do with the stated concept. It is not that bad and critical. Welcome Reality is club music offering a lot to do for your body, not your brain.

Nero need experience, they got everything else already

Despite its infant age, dubstep has already made friends with a lot of genres and does not show off in its pure form that often. On their debut effort Welcome Reality the Nero duo sailed away from straightforward usage of the genre and preferred to enrich it with borrowings from other schools. In this sense, dubset and its rhythms are more like a big hall to be furnished properly so that it would please the visitor. Welcome Reality is furnished really well, while it was a hell of a job to do. A hundred minutes is a big room that you can use wisely or make a mess out of. As true British, Daniel and Joe are music connoisseurs and have the intuition to know where to extract ideas for their material. That is the reason why we hear synths from the German rave scene of the early nineties or even psychedelic guitars from progressive rock. These men worked really hard for their debut, might be too heard. But what Welcome Reality is short of is the depth, the intrigue that would drag the audience half-conscious into the maze of the record. No doubt, Nero will learn how to do it if they keep working with the same creativity and enthusiasm.