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Shit cover, shit album. But you knew that already. Dali may be the only person since Alien Project to stick their arse on the cover of one of their CD’s but she still looks like a duck. And yes I made that bit up about Alien Project’s arse. The assembled masses of People With Taste (that’s you lot) would probably sooner be confronted with the back end of Ari Linker than listen to this anyway.

Hectic is probably the best argument in favour of illegal file-sharing networks I have ever come across. It is your duty to steal this, and it is my duty to incite you to steal it.

The music is largely very substandard isra-eurotrance fodder, with the additional cancerous bonus of Dali’s singing. Her voice isn’t bad: Follow The Signs is tight in a Morcheeba sort of way, even if the melody is more or less nicked off Seal’s Crazy. Other tracks on the album see her habitually singing beyond her range, and not making a great deal of sense as she does so. Her three singing voices are one that sounds a bit like Kate Bush, one that sounds a bit like Beth Gibbons, and one that sounds a bit like Michele Adamson.

Keeping all this in mind, how about some background. Quoted in last month’s Mushroom Magazine, in the bit about women in trance, Dali patronises “Girls want security, something that they can continue with for the rest of their lives, where they can have a baby with a relaxed mind,” thus negating decades of women’s liberation and dispelling the myth that this is a scene that empowers strong, independent women.

In this illuminating interview from a couple of months ago, she comes across as a bimbo: she wants to be a professional surfer, her role model is Madonna and her advice to other women in the scene is “Don’t think too much, just do it.” Lyrically she lapses into weak cliché (“I need someone to hold me tight”) and seems to like fitting into this mode of a wide-eyed industry chick, rabbit in the headlights style: “who am I and where are you, please tell me what to do.”

With little lyrical substance, you might hope that strong music might give this album vital life support. Of course, it doesn’t. For the most part, Dali’s music is exquisitely shit, although it really reaches its faecal zenith in the tracks with Silent Hill, who are the real villains here. There are grotesque guitars, over-the-top high end pads and arpeggios a six-year-old might write. I’m not even going to analyse this one track by track: it’s pointless.

Hectic is more than an album. It’s a signpost of where we are and where we’re going. We have reached the point where a woman of average attractiveness, who sings below-average lyrics in a below-average manner, can sit at a mixing desk and produce something as tackily disposable as this; and it gets picked up and hyped to death by the biggest label on the planet. The real travesty in all this is how much it will sell.

Utterly dreadful as an album, utterly fascinating as a cultural phenomenon.

No score (which is different from zero).

Not sure what the fuss is about? Then "enjoy" listening to the whole thing here.