Alec Empire - Shivers EP

Having lost his way creatively in recent years, Alec Empire desperately needed to deliver on his latest mini-album. Instead, Shivers is definitively the worst record of his career. The vapid electro-workouts such as Control Drug and Baby Skull are embarrassing enough, but the title track itself is verging on the unlistenable: a soporific piano ballad layered with swooshing synths over which Empire mumbles interminably, his vocals at this point approximating William Shatner with a thick Berlin accent. Empire even sounds bored during the two live tracks on offer, which serve only as a pointless addendum to another spectacularly misjudged experiment in the aesthetics of electro. Bafflingly bad. [Mark Shukla]