I’ve been listening to the latest album by German melodic death metal outfit PARASITE INC. on repeat for a few days now. This band is what IN FLAMES could have been if only they hadn’t… well… done every single thing that they’ve done over the past 15 years or so to severely piss off their old-school fanbase and strayed away from their roots.

Dead and Alive is, quite simply, brilliant.

It has the perfect blend of balls-out raw aggression, precision, power, speed, rage, and technicality that defines really great melodic death metal. I love this sort of stuff – always have, ever since I first listened to CHILDREN OF BODOM’s Follow the Reaper back in 2001. (I still maintain that this is their magnum opus. Nothing that COB has done before or since has come anywhere close. Some fans prefer Hatebreeder, but I think that the production values on FTR are much cleaner.)

But, there is one song on the DOA album that is a bit… odd.

It’s called “Empty Streets”, and it’s actually a SCANDROID cover.

Damn if it ain’t catchier than crabs, though.

So after I heard it for the first time, I simply had to go find out who the hell these SCANDROID chaps were.

Turns out, they are an electronica duo, and they actually have quite a history.

Listen to the original “Empty Streets”, and tell me that isn’t a truly great retro 80s tune:

They call their sound “Neo-Tokyo”, a fusion of 80s synth and keyboards with a vibe that hearkens back to the legendary dystopian sci-fi and action movies of the past. You know the genre – Total Recall, Rising Sun, Blade Runner, and so on and so forth.

The last time I heard a fusion of sounds that reminded me so strongly of such movies was JUDAS PRIEST’s “Blood Red Skies”. Not surprisingly, this is also one of my all-time favourite PRIEST tracks:

Looks like I’ll be adding SCANDROID to my LONG list of head-space music to listen to in the near future…