Your reviewer is a simple Northern girl who has never intentionally hurt anyone. She pays her taxes, works hard for a living and even stands up for little old ladies on the bus. Well, she would do if she ever got the bus, but that’s beside the point.

The point here is – was I Hitler in a former life or something? The forces of karma, if I believed in them, appear to be giving me an almighty bite on the behind by forcing me into listening to this atrocity. A four-track EP would be bad enough, but for some bizarre reason Outputmessage decided to ‘bless’ us with a whopping seven-track EP.

Outputmessage consists of one man and his synthesiser. The man in question – Bernard Farley – is a university graduate from Washington DC who majored in maths and is under the delusion that because he pushes a few buttons on a synthesiser that he is a bona fide musician. Oh dear. Currently working as a private maths tutor to tide him over until he makes it big in the world of music – my own personal recommendation would be to not give up his day job. Ever.

During one of the tracks, don’t ask which one because they all sounded the same to me, I actually got up to check that my CD player hadn’t stuck. I was horrified to discover that it hadn’t and the track was actually supposed to sound like that. It’s a shame because the very beginning of the opening track boasts a great little melody that sounds uncannily like the theme tune to the original Star Trek, which was highly impressive. Sadly such a musical interlude was only transitory and quickly deteriorated into the rest of the far-too-long-and-downright-boring EP.

I would love to tell you what each tune sounded like, but to these obviously uneducated ears it all sounded like one very long track of bog-standard, completely uninspired dance music that went nowhere. Halfway through the opening track, ‘Funeral’, I had started to contemplate my own. By the time the closing track, ‘Resurface’, came along – my will to live had completely abandoned me and is quite likely now swilling brandy in a pub, trying to forget this harrowing experience.

After reading other simply glowing reviews of this EP I am prepared to concede that I possibly wasn’t the right person to review this one. Maybe I hadn’t taken enough hallucinogenic drugs to appreciate it properly. Maybe I’m just getting old. Or maybe I’m right, and it actually is the most dreadful example of why maths geeks should never be given synthesisers for Christmas…