Stigmata

First time on vinyl - limited to 500 copies only. Synth whiz Martin Rev, co-founder of legendary New York underground art rockers Suicide, has gone classical on his eighth solo album, but it's classical of a particularly Rev-esque nature. Blatantly performed on a keyboard, the 14 short tracks that make up Stigmata sound like excerpts from the score for a direct-to-video fantasy film, the sub-Enya "harp" sounds of "Jubilate" and the swooning strings of "Te Deum" (all the song titles are in Latin) providing suitably cheesy backdrops for Rev's minimalist, barely-in-tune crooning. Though "Sanctus" tries to crank things up a little, this music doesn't even have the pomposity and epic darkness of, say, the faux-classical interludes on a Dimmu Borgir album, nor does it have the coiled energy and relentlessness of Rev's work with Suicide. Each track takes a single idea and loops it for two or three minutes with almost no variation, and even at its most amped-up ("Domine," "Exultate") it