Y'know how first impressions last? Well, just how much of a good impression did Alfred Mueller really expect to leave when his cheap computer printer chugged out the cover for 'Unknown Realities' on bile-coloured paper of the poorest quality? Somewhere, a church fete is missing a poster.

For the few of you who are unfamiliar with Alfred, I'll explain. He was born in 1962. He started taking organ lessons at the age of twelve. He acquired his first synthesizer when he was seventeen. In the Nineties he formed a rockin' band with the ass-kicking name Rachel's Birthday. In 2010 his new album made me seriously consider pouring red-hot badger piss into my ears.

This is album number ten from Soniq Theater. How do I know? It says so on the 1980's Chinese takeaway menu-esque cover. Mueller plays every instrument on the album and recorded, produced, mixed, blah, blah, blah it all. He says that "Soniq Theater is recommended to all open-minded progressive rock fans and is appreciated as well by 'normal people' with some musical education." Hmm, if that education consists of learning how it feels to ram an eight-track tape up your own arse then maybe he's right.

The first track on the album is called 'Longing For Freedom' but from this day forth I rechristen it 'The Dawn Of Disasters.' It sounds like the background music of a corporate video from three decades ago. I half expect some facial hair-abused managerial dinosaur with leather elbow patches to start telling me about the positives of a career in concrete. If there is a hidden compartment below the bottom of the barrel then Mueller has found it when the second song 'Revealing A Dream' cracks out of the speakers like a bolt of beige. This is what the soundtrack to a Rocky Balboa training montage would sound like if Hollywood was moved to Milton Keynes.

This is an album as healthy as something that just got washed up on the shore. It is elevator music for an alternative universe where elevators are shit-smeared cardboard boxes that take automatons from their jobs in advertising to their painless deaths, killed one atom at a time by tedious albums that should never escape the bedrooms of the delusional loners who create them. The last song is called 'Slipping Into The Future' but surely Alfred has simply spelt 'A Coma' wrong.

Maybe I'm being a little harsh on Alfred. This music is his passion and he plays it well but, if I'm being totally honest, if this was the first album heard by Josef Fritzel's family when they first stepped out of his secret cellar then they surely would have begged to be locked back in.

The first album that I have reviewed that actually made my soul feel sick.

www.myspace.com/soniqtheater