The brainchild of US drummer/multi-instrumentalist Rona Rougeheart, SINE has released a new single entitled ‘Succumb To Me’ on Metropolis Records today. Co-produced by Rougeheart with Curse Mackey (Pigface) and mastered by Mark Pistel (Consolidated, Meat Beat Manifesto), the song mixes industrial sounds with dirty disco and rhythmic sub bass to form the perfect definition of what she refers to as her signature genre, ‘electronic boom’.
“While working on my next album, I decided to open a new session and start something fresh just for fun,” Rougeheart recalls. “As another track began to form, I was really loving the vibe, so I anchored it around two deep synth bass hits that pan right and left to give the listener a surround sound experience, especially in headphones. The lyrics seemed to write themselves as I recorded scratch vocals, just letting it flow. The lyrics are cheeky and a little sinister, with a dash of sex appeal. It’s definitely one of my favourite SINE tunes to date!”
It’s been three years since Curse Mackey deliveredImmoral Emporium. Three years may not be a long time, but a lot can happen in three years – and it has. And very little of it has been good. There has always something about industrial music – something I’ll unpick in a moment – which has displayed a sense of the apocalyptic, to the extent that at times it seems to almost bask in it. And that is not a criticism. The end is nigh, and while it’s always a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’, we seem to be ever closer to the brink of total annihilation. These are dark times, which call for dark music.
Industrial has come to mean many things, in terms of musical forms over the years, while Throbbing Gristle were the progenitors of all things industrial, technological advances saw acts more interested in pursuing more structured works with tape loops and drum machines, eventually giving us the more electro-orientated strain of industrial that became synonymous with Wax Trax!, and, subsequently, industrial metal, not least of all due to Ministry’s evolution from one to the other. Curse Mackey’s work very much belongs to that late 89s / early 90s Wax Trax! domain.
Concluding the trilogy which began with 2019’s Instant Exorcism, Imaginary Enemies promises to be ‘his most intense and intimate album to date… A bleak, beautiful meditation on paranoia, grief, and the ghosts we conjure from within’.
And so it is that the listener is lead into the album by route of looped samples, layering across one another, before a pounding beat crashes in, and Mackey, accompanied by a low, thumping synth bass groove, sets out his stall with ‘pressure points’, ‘psychosis’, and ‘decay’ delivered with a processed growl. There are many layers to the arrangements, creating simultaneously an expansive and claustrophobic feel. Single cut ‘Vertigo Ego’ swiftly plunges into darker, denser territories: brooding and ominous, Mackey’s vocals are a barely audible whisper. It sounds tormented, stressed, anguished.
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If ‘Discoccult’ and ‘Time Comes Clean’ (which calls to mind early (electropop) Ministry and Trudge era Controlled Bleeding) find us in fairly familiar industrial territory, something about the production imbues the material with a suffocating intensity. More often than not, there’s a brightness, a crispness, something of a ‘digital’ cleanness about the genre. In contrast, the sound here is murkier, more ‘analogue’ in feel, alluding to eighties synth music – something I’ve never been quite able to pinpoint as a listener and critic rather than a producer.
One can reasonably assume that album centrepoint ‘Blood Like Love’ makes a reference to Killing Joke’s ‘Love Like Blood’, even if only in title, but sees Curse lean towards gothier territories, stark, brooding, yet ultimately layered, graceful, with synth melodies and dramatic piano weaving around the samples and mechanised beats.
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The second half of the album locks into an atmosphere that’s less aggressive and attacking, and more brooding, moody, and introspective, and as such, marks a clear departure from its predecessors. What’s more, it works well, with the more uptempo title track marking a high point in the album, sitting comfortably alongside some of the more contemporary goth classics with its nagging, reverb-heavy guitar line and pulsating bass all held together by that classic, relentless, drum machine sound.
For my money, it’s Curse Mackey’s best release to date.
Curse Mackey has enjoyed an enviable career as a frequent performer with legendary industrial collectives Pigface and My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, and has built a substantial catalogue of work as a solo artist too – and it’s perhaps to be expected that much of this, including his latest, Immoral Emporium, is defined by the vintage late 80s / early 90s Wax Trax! electroindustrial sound.
While Immoral Emporium is undeniably dark, it’s also fairly poppy and accessible, with a title track that calls to mind more recent Gary Numan. And this is in the region of the album’s tone and style overall.
Starting off, ‘Smoking Tongues’ is strong on melody and surprisingly sparse retro synths and while Depeche Mode circa Black Celebration comparisons are likely the obvious choice, it’s as much A Flock of Seagulls. That may appear to some as a rather casual dismissal as being flimsy pop, but the electropop that rode the charts in the early to mid-80s was way darker than it’s usually given credit for or remembered as being. Consequently, suggesting that the spoken-word verses of ‘A Sharp Reminder’ are reminiscent of Pet Shop Boys’ ‘West End Girls’ is absolutely no sleight.
‘The Reveal’ takes a turn for the more overtly industrial, with menacing synth bass pulsations and a death disco thudding beat. ‘Dead Fingers talk’ borders on bouncy, and while ‘Lost Body Hypothesis’ is harder, darker, and driven by a nagging bass, it’s in the same sphere as Nine Inch Nail’s ‘Sin’, and it’s that late-80s grind that dominates Immoral Emporium. Many will bang on about how Pretty Hate Machine broke new ground, but the fact is, without denigrating what is undeniably an outstanding and era-defining album, that it only broke the territory in commercial terms. It maty have added some layers of noise in the production, but it didn’t really add all that much to what Ministry and Depeche Mode had already been doing, and that’s before we get to the conveyor-belt catalogue run of acts churned out by Wax Trax! between 1986 and 1988 with releases by the likes of Revolting Cocks, Front 242, and Fini Tribe. There was a certain sameness among the label’s acts and releases, but they worked, because there’s something instinctive and primal about drums that thump and clatter distortedly against insistent bass workouts and various elements of extraneous noise.
On Immoral Emporium, Curse very much revisits his roots, and it’s well-realised with solid songs packed back-to-back.
On September 9, darkwave artist Curse Mackey will release his highly-anticipated new full-length album, Immoral Emporium, the follow-up to his 2019 industrial masterpiece, Instant Exorcism. Curse will also embark on a North American tour as a special guest for darkwave legends, Clan of Xymox. Immoral Emporium is an intense, dark electronic music experience. Curse emphasizes, “This is a NEW album for modern times, in the here and now.”
True to his word, Immoral Emporium pushes the boundaries of genre with a vast dynamic range, from a tortured whisper to a triumphant howl. The first single, “Lacerations” is a dancefloor stomper with hypnotic vocals, a hard-hitting chorus with wailing synths and bin-shaking beats.
The album moves into poppy, upbeat club territory with the earworm ‘Dead Fingers Talk’. The buildups are big, such as in ‘Omens and Monuments’, with monstrous synths that bring Immoral Emporium to a goosebump-inducing, cathartic end leaving the listener looking forward to the future.
Curse says, “Immoral Emporium was created under very remote, unusual, stressful conditions. This record is a dangerous listen. By the time it reaches the last song, I, as the protagonist, am essentially already dead. However, my last words are meant to give hope to the listener, my friends around the world…that you can live to fight another day, knowing you don’t have to give in to the fear, pain, and worry. These things will pass and you are not alone."
Clocking the William Burroughs reference in ‘Dead Fingers Talk’, interest in the album is piqued here at Aural Aggravation, and never more so than by the promo clip for ‘Lacerations’, released as a taster for the album, which you can watch here:
Aural Aggravation 