Usually when I listen to a new mind.in.a.box album, at least one song makes me immediately think, “This is awesome!” My favorites from albums and associated singles look something like this:
- Lost Alone (2004)
- Light & Dark
- Change
- Dreamweb (2005)
- Certainty
- Beyond the World
- Crossroads (2007)
- Into the Night
- Fear
- One Day
- R.E.T.R.O. (2010)
- Whatever Mattered
- 8 Bits (8.6 Bits Mix)
- Revelations (2012)
- Control
- Memories (2015)
- Timelessness
- Broken Legacies (2017)
- Overwrite
- World of Promises
- Black and White (2023)
- It’s So Good to See You
- Insurrectionist
- Just Like You Always Wanted
- Fire and Lace
I didn’t have that experience with Retaliation though. In fact, when I got to the end of the album, I was mostly confused by what I had heard. Something about every song bothered or bemused me. I did not expect retro synthwave, which made me think of 80s music memes.
I picked out the same drumbeat underplaying multiple songs. Vocal choruses made me think of Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World.” “This song is cheesy as hell,” I thought at some times. “This song is beating me over the head with conservative talking points,” I thought at others. Sometimes I wondered if I was merely repelled by the female singer or occasional high-energy trance music, both of which I rarely listen to and sometimes find irritating. Some songs felt lyrically dense and couldn’t be enjoyed without understanding them.
Still, I knew what I had listened to was conceptually fascinating. Even after more than twenty years of making music and thirteen previous albums, this was unlike any music Stefan Poiss had produced before. He’d never had a backup singer before (aside from one line in Black and White and a couple collaborations with Ray Koefoed). He’d never sung like this before. “I’ve often wondered whether Stefan Poiss has by now tried every conceivable way to electronically distort his voice,” a review amused me. Apparently, he hadn’t because even Retaliation‘s vocal treatments were unlike any he’d done before.
Despite all the differences, Retaliation also felt like a natural progression of mind.in.a.box’s themes and explorations. I wondered at the end of Black and White what it would be like if the characters in mind.in.a.box’s cyberpunk saga had voices other than Stefan’s to speak through. I was pleased to see this idea come to fruition in Retaliation… although Stefan left it strangely open to interpretation as to whether there is in fact a vocalist besides himself. Unlike Black and White, Stefan doesn’t credit anyone, not even himself, as vocalists in the lyric book. One reviewer speculated that the female vocals are merely an extreme distortion of Stefan’s. The male vocals in “Little Miss Vicious” don’t sound like Stefan’s and yet I can’t fathom why it would be someone else. Stefan’s deep, raw voice often makes an appearance in mind.in.a.box albums, but he’s never sung raw falsetto as he does in Retaliation. Both these points add to the plausibility that Stefan has the capability to distort his voice so much that it becomes convincingly feminine. Meanwhile, Discogs claims that the female vocalist is Elizabeth Hourigan, the same who sang one line in Black and White. Stefan’s secretiveness seems by design as solving the mystery of who the vocalists are adds to the album’s intrigue. Is the male in “Little Miss Vicious” actually a distortion of Elizabeth Hourigan’s voice? O.O Regardless, I feel like I’ve gotten to experience the mind.in.a.box story told through a larger cast, even if Stefan is secretly still playing all the characters.
This answer gave me another question though. Does mind.in.a.box exist without Stefan Poiss’ voice? Were the songs that featured the female vocalist lesser because of Stefan’s loss or diminishment? Considering I spent several months studying and writing articles about everything to do with mind.in.a.box except for Stefan Poiss and the music itself — as if the story, themes, and lyrics were what was most important — I found these particularly interesting questions for me to be asking. Similar questions arose among fans when mind.in.a.box’s Revelations album was released. Stefan’s vocals and vocal treatments in Revelations differed from previous albums after he’d spent two years training his voice for live concerts. The increased presence and strength of his natural singing voice confused and irked some fans. While I enjoyed the experiment with another vocalist in Retaliation, I also admit that I had a similar experience in feeling jarred by the change. Over time, Stefan’s honed natural singing voice has become an integral part of mind.in.a.box’s sound. Similarly, while Retaliation has an extremely different approach to vocals from previous albums, it’s likely that it will also become a natural progression in the band’s sound.
Pervading many of mind.in.a.box’s themes is the concept of minds/people escaping their boxes in various ways. Retaliation defies what mind.in.a.box was known to be, allowing the band and Stefan to escape their own box.
Retaliation is unquestionably disappointing in at least one way though. The previous album Black and White opened with these words from The Friend, an ally of the protagonist Mr. Black:
Don’t you worry. As you know, only those with a free mind can use the device to enter the Dreamweb.
In the final dramatic moment ending Black and White, Black makes a shocking discovery about his nemesis Mr. White:
In the plane of the Dreamweb…
White’s face staring back at me…
After all of my endless struggles,
How can this possibly be?
How can this possibly be?
In most albums, White has appeared obsessive and miserable in his search to attain the Dreamweb as if he doesn’t merely want to control those who have escaped to this alternate reality but has a personal need to reach this place. The ending to Black and White suggests that White’s misery, and apparent death at Black’s hands, has finally led him to a revelation about his life or his actions that frees him to access the Dreamweb. It also tells Black that his black and white thinking is incorrect, and White may not be as evil as he perceived. What did White discover? Indeed, how can this possibly be? And what will happen to the Dreamweb now that White has accessed it?
Retaliation‘s supplementary lyric book story wraps up this cliff hanger quite unsatisfyingly. The Dreamweb remains unchanged. We hear nothing of what happens to White while he’s there. He spends several months transforming into a superhuman cyborg while in a coma and then awakens to spread more war and chaos than his lackies did in his absence. What made White interesting in previous albums is replaced with stereotypical bad guy flair. Additionally, war is about the most boring plot to fill in a science fiction or fantasy story. I’m more interested in character interactions and individual battles than political intrigue and masses of faceless people fighting one another. Unfortunately, Retaliation‘s lyric book story and songs tend more toward relating such faceless battles and anti-authoritarian messaging than any conflicting feelings Black, Night, White, and The Friend may have.
Granted, mind.in.a.box’s story has never been amazing. It’s a minimalistic to middling cyberpunk story elevated by the medium and method through which it’s told. The music has always been most important in mind.in.a.box’s philosophy. Still, Retaliation followed Black and White, which contained some of the strongest storytelling in mind.in.a.box’s history. As someone who loved Black and White‘s integration of story and music, I have to think part of what bothered me about Retaliation was that I expected a continuation of that story and was instead mostly serenaded with war songs. Even for its storytelling innovations, Retaliation also felt like a step backward.
Like the album, the lyric book story isn’t all bothersome though. I was expecting the story to handwave away Black’s escape from White’s office, where he left off at the end of Black and White, and begin sometime afterward. Instead, the story began with Black’s escape, which was really cool. I also enjoyed that Night, a character that has spent little time in the spotlight in any album, had a larger role to play.
Having listened to the album a few times now, I still can’t say that I have a favorite song, although “Little Miss Vicious,” “Greatest Glory,” “We’ll Jump Together,” and “Immunity” are competing. It’s the album I’ve found to be most true to Stefan’s philosophy that music is to be savored, not consumed in a hit of dopamine. Retaliation doesn’t have a hard-hitting song that grabbed me immediately, but I’ve found the more I listen to it, the more I appreciate it and the more enjoyable it becomes.