ENVINITY: A STUDY IN WHAT NOT TO DO IF YOU’RE AN UNKNOWN BAND

There are two concepts that everyone in every genre or music today needs to get into their heads — and even more so if, say, you’re an unknown band that does not already have a significant following:

• Physical media is dead.
• It’s all about the music, stupid. Get your material out to the masses. If they like it, you will develop a fan base.

Pretty simple, right?

Now, keep this mind as you consider Moira’s Lake, the new album from Envinity, a band whose name means nothing in both the literal sense (“envinity” is not a real word) and figurative sense (you’ve never heard of this band before — this is the first thing that comes up when you Google their band moniker).

Here’s the first thing you will see if you go to the official web page for Moira’s Lake:

That’s right: for the low, low cost of fifty bucks — or twenty-seven bucks, if you pledge to get “at least one friend or family member to buy this” — you can get the album (“completely remixed and remastered,” although why anyone would give a shit about a remastered edition of a record they’ve never heard in the first place is completely beyond me), a running “creator’s commentary” (in case you’ve ever wanted to listen to people talk over music so you can’t actually hear that music), a two-hour making-of documentary, two twenty minute making-of featurettes (in case you didn’t feel that everything was sufficiently covered in the two-hour making-of documentary), the short story for Moira’s Lake (WTF?), the “never before released” lyrics to the album (nope, I have no clue when they would ever have been released previously), five desktop wallpapers (’cause those are worth money), and, oh yeah, A MOTHERFUCKING GAG REEL, because, as we all know, what most great records are missing is a gag reel.

Now, this is obviously incredibly silly. It might sell if it were being offered by a band or artist that already has a fan base — I probably would actually enjoy the first-ever gag reel for an album if said gag-reel were being put out by someone I know to be particularly funny, like Devin Townsend or GWAR or Frank Mullen — but I have no idea how you’d sell all this shit to people who have never even fucking heard of the band.

And yet, amazingly enough, this isn’t even the stupidest thing about Moira’s Lake. The stupidest thing is that at no point during the epic journey through the album’s ridiculously long-winded web page do you ever get to hear more than about ten seconds of music. Because, y’know, who wouldn’t spend thirty to fifty dollars on something they’ve never heard before from an artist they’ve never heard of?

No no no, instead of music, it’s much more important that you get lots of grand declarations, like this one, which hinges on the A++++ marketing concept that you’ll spend a lot of money on something you probably will not enjoy because you’re too dumb to understand it…

…and lots of really, really, really, REALLY lengthy exultations about how Envinity are “upping the ante for what a truly artistic music experience should be,” and how “you can’t listen to Moira’s Lake the same way that you listen to your average pop album,” and how the record is “probably the first of its kind,”  and who the fuck knows what else. And when I say “REALLY lengthy,” I mean it. For example, check out this ironically titled section:

And that’s just one of the many novella-length chunks of text on the site’s main page.

Occasionally — and mercifully — Niko Van Steenhoven, “the songwriter and vocalist (among other things) for Envinity,” does stop typing long enough to let us hear some actual music and thus figure out why the fucking fuck we should care about this record, but, as I was saying before, even then it’s only for a few seconds — usually because he’s talking over the track. For example, in the first two-minute long “music clip” — which is on Soundcloud, but is not embeddable, because, again, if you’re an unknown band, the last thing you want is for as many people as possible to be able to hear your music — features exactly six seconds when Van Steenhoven isn’t talking about how amazing his music is, and how it will make you cry, and there’s no drums, and whatever the fuck else he seems to think is really, really mind-blowing about his own work. And all the clips are like that — Van Steenhoven refuses to just shut the fuck up and stop describing for us that to which we are already listening.

What the fuck?

What the fuck?

What the fuck?

WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?!?!

So now that I’ve provided you with this whole explanation of why Envinity’s entire game plan is… what’s the phrase I’m searching for…? oh, yeah, COMPLETELY FUCKING FUCKTARDED, I am actually going to encourage you to check out their web page (which is ten times longer than this very long post), and experience the hilarity for yourself.

And if any of you actually do shell out for this thing, by all means, please e-mail us and let us know if Moira’s Lake is, indeed, the life-altering experience the band claims it to be.

-AR

Thanks to James for the tip. He refers to Envinity as “the most pretentious metal band in the world,” and rightfully so.