What the hell is a deathstar? I had no idea, so I checked the dictionary (hooray!), but was unable to find it, for there was no such word as deathstar in this book of wordly knowledge. Which means we’ll have to make due without an explanation. Deathstars, the name will stay unexplained, is a band, an industrial metal band from Sweden. The four bandmembers have each made up their own idiotic nicknames (“Honey, let’s name him Nightmare Industries”) and oddball clothing style. The names vary from Whiplasher, the vocalist, to Bone W. Machine, drummer. Of course I can understand if your name is Heinz Schmäckelknacker that you would want to choose a different name. This all to show that my expectations were quite low. However, Deathstars’ Synthetic Generation appeared not to be as crappy as I first imagined.

The first thing that jumps out is the production. Synthetic Generation sounds as though it has been welded shut and sealed off with sixteen padlocks. For a debut-album, that is pretty remarkable. The album has been produced by the aforementioned Nightmare Industries, who is the guitarist, bass-player and programmer of the band. Well done. The album is mixed by Stefan Glaumann, who before worked with Rammstein, Clawfinger and Def Leppard. Maybe it is also because of him that Deathstars, at some points is a sort of an English-speaking Rammstein.

I was looking for some additional information on Deathstars when I found out they are currently on a European tour with Paradise Lost.

The music sounds a lot like Rammstein (“The Rape”, “Little Angel”) as well, but with different kind of vocals, very low-pitched and dark, kind of like Type O Negative and Paradise Lost. And in English; I guess Swedish wasn’t a particularly good marketing choice.

Instrumentally everything sounds the way it should, all very well done, without fantastic solo’s or anything like that, but that doesn’t really suit industrial metal anyway. The bandmembers stem from bands like Dissection, a name that vaguely rang a bell and Swordmaster, whom I had never heard of, but underground metal people might have.

All in all this album has 10 very good industrial metal, Rammstein-like songs on it, one mediocre cover of Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” and one song I do not care for called “No Light”. That means this is a good album. A song like “The Rape” is actually quite catchy, with nice keyboard sounds in the background, and a strange kind of voice-over thing singing ‘coming back’; very cool song. The album has lots of those keyboard things, which I always like in Rammstein songs.

If you like Rammstein and maybe Ministry (who I think are fantastic), you will probably like Deathstars’ Synthetic Generation as well. If that’s the case this would be a good investment.