Tourettes Syndrome is a band of Australians, fronted by a female singer, who can sound like a man, without looking like a hag. ‘Sick Sense’ is their album’s title. A terrible, terrible title. It reminds of dime a dozen nu-metal of 1998, filled with thoughtlessness and pretend misery of happy people. Thus, my expectations were to hear dreadful clichés and played out riffs. After some spins, ‘Sick Sense’ proves to indeed not back off the clichés and played out riffs, but it also proves there is perhaps some future promise in between.

The album starts off as if the band thinks they have to prove that Michele Madden, their female vocalist, can sing aggressively, in a sort of low ‘hiss’. The riffs that accompany this hiss are quite catchy, but in a pretty good way. When they do these types of songs it’s nu-metal, and they do about five of these. These songs are decent most of the time, with the exception of ‘Fracture’, number three on ‘Sick Sense’.
This song starts of badly already, with Michele whispering: ‘To crucify myself with honesty, it’s time, you just sit back, I’ll take the lead, I’ll walk the line’. This makes my flesh crawl, knees jerk and stomach revolve -by the way, the lyrics have that effect (albeit in a lighter form) more often on the album-. However, once we’re through the first layer of awful, we get truly, one of the most dreaded pieces of music of all time. After 30 seconds Michele sings in a really strange voice, like she is singing through a large plastic pipe, the drums sound hollow and especially unimaginative, and the riff that completes the mix is really, just… So awful it makes you want kick your CD player to bits and wish you never had ears. Really, it’s that bad. Also, towards the end they put some synthesiser noises into the mix, an ill-advised plan. At about 50 seconds to go it kind of gets back on track (what track?) to mediocrity.

In this song, it is the ways Miss Madden sings, that are the song’s defining graces of vomit.
The previous paragraph was one to show you how awful Tourettes Syndrome are when they have a bad idea. I’m not saying they really are appalling yet, I’m saying ‘Fracture’ is ghastly, and if you ever pick up this CD, skip it ASAP.
The best songs on this album are the songs when the band’s vocalist is not exhibiting her throat oddities, but instead sings cleanly. It also seems as though the band feels more in place on these songs. You’ll notice as well, that the clean, more melodic parts in the ‘nu-metal’ songs, are the best ones.
The best song on ‘Sick Sense’ is its number five, called ‘Glad’ -although the one that goes before is also quite good-. This song is one that is well balanced, well structured, well sung; an all around good song. Not surprisingly, vocals on this one are clean.
So then, what does this leave us with? An album that is both bad and good. Songs like ‘Fracture’ and ‘Curcus’, I hope to never hear again, while songs like ‘Glad’ and ‘Gear’ are worthy of more spins. Obviously, that leaves seven songs unspoken. Of those, one is plain crappy, two are forgettable and four are quite decent. Given those figures you still wouldn’t give Tourettes Syndrome the time of day, probably, and I actually would advise to not buy this album unless it is for sale for like 7.99 or something, but I will say that this is a band with some potential, so don’t crucify them yet. If they focus on melody and songwriting (and help out with the lyrics here and there?) and tell Michele to tone it down until it’s clean, then they’d have themselves a bit of a niche… And, oh yes, structurally good music.