Static-X's Shadow Zone is a numbingly vacuous, no-dimensional dud that seems to have arrived via wormhole from 1998.

In songs like "Kill Your Idols," "Destroy All," and "Monster," Wayne Static -- who's never sounded more like Korn's Jonathan Davis -- yells nonsense like "My head's a loaded gun" and "Breathing, killing, seething, willing" over thudding, one-note thrash busied up with dated electronic fuzz.

Producer Josh Abraham (Orgy, Crazy Town) flattens the material to a harsh hiss, reducing the drumming to a vague click behind an impenetrable wall of guitars, and eventually it all just sounds like, yes, static.

By mid-album, "The Only"'s foray into Stabbing Westward-style electro-industrial provides depth simply by being derivative in a different way.

(Even here, Static's vocal resemblance to Davis is stunning.) Reliance on formula has always been admissible in metal, but it's Static-X's apparent refusal to try anything new or remotely original that makes Shadow Zone such a disappointment.

Predictably, the album ends clumsily.

"So" and "Invincible" debut some sort of double-track effect on Static's voice, which makes him sound like Layne Staley instead of Davis.

Along with the interlude "Transmission," which probably seemed a lot scarier in the studio, the two tracks are a final indictor of Static-X's quickly advancing irrelevance.

Shadow Zone's impossibly generic cover art only makes it more indistinguishable.