Posts Tagged ‘Industrial’

Tigercide – Remedy Remix – John Bechdel

Posted: 20 June 2023 in Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

James Wells

We’re a little late to the party with this one, but we’re glad to be here now. Well, I say ‘glad’… This is like arriving late to the party and everyone is already half cut and you wonder if you should have actually come at all. Something feels dark, it feels as if something’s brewing, something menacing. If you ever feel on edge and like you’re often casting a glance over your shoulder for reasons unknown, this is not going to help.

Unfamiliar as I am with Tigercide – which probably something I need to address, and as swiftly as possible, this immediately feels familiar, and also uncanny – that is to say, familiar but not quite. Tigercide trade in dark electro, with subtle trip-hop infusions interwoven through their atmospheric tunes.

Having released their ‘Remedy’ EP in 2019, the remix EP is set for release this autumn. Following a couple of standalone singles, they’ve started sliding out tasters for the new EP, and John Bechdel’s take on ‘Remedy’ is magnificent.

It’s not overtly witchy or creepy, but has a real skin-crawling ominousness that sets you on edge, and if Shexist’s vocals on the original were haunting atop the low-end throb and reverb-soaked snare clatter, Bechdel has spun everything onto a dark, misty industrial-tinged anxiety dream. It sets you on edge, it’s tense, and it’s special.

AA

Tigercide_RemedyRemix_CoverDigital

Listen: ‘Land Lord’ by Godflesh

Posted: 31 May 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

Godflesh share new track "LAND LORD" from their forthcoming album, PURGE. It’s a track which spirals out in pent-up rage from the first second, distorting and mutating 90’s drum and bass through the Godflesh filter.

About the track Justin comments, “’LAND LORD’ references ownership, entitlement and the objectification of human beings, as practised by almost anyone who wields power.”

Listen to ‘Land Lord’ here:

With the highly anticipated new album PURGE, Godflesh brings a whole host of new dirges and laments. Amongst the many layers of dirt, PURGE mangles 90s hip hop grooves and puts them through the Godflesh filter to create something futuristic in style – and utterly unique.

Both minimal and maximal, Godflesh deliver alien grooves that swing whilst also retaining the psychedelic, bad trip edge with layer upon layer of filth and heaviness – that Godflesh have always been known for. This is, and always has been, feel-bad music.

The title alone – PURGE – references directly how songwriter and creator Justin K. Broadrick utilises Godflesh’s music as a temporary relief from his diagnosed autism and PTSD. It’s the next stage in a journey he has been on since he began creating music, feeling alone and like an outsider in any scene or group, from childhood through to adulthood.

The music of Godflesh gives Broadrick the means to express a lifetime of feeling misunderstood and overwhelmed by hyper-sensitivity. The band is the vehicle to provide some sense of catharsis and transcendence; a way of communicating overload, as well as the constant disenchantment at the human condition, and man’s abuse of power and the systems that chain us.

PURGE references the cycle of horror that man always has and always will put us through; those in positions of power revel in the infliction of pain and horror upon individuals – in the name of their religion, their power, their money, their flags…

PURGE is out on 9th June.

M0QwWbig

Girls Under Glass – Backdraft

Posted: 21 May 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Dependent Records – 2nd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Now in their twenty-seventh year, Girls Under Glass return after an extended break – of some seventeen years – with a new album that wasn’t wholly planned. As the bio notes, explain, when they started composing some new tracks for an EP to round off a planned boxset of their complete works, ‘The fire reignited and songs kept coming… [they] understood that their batteries had recharged to bursting point after a 17-year break and the projected EP turned into a full-length.

The trouble with being forerunners and progenitors is that time catches up. What was innovative at one time becomes assimilated, absorbed: ‘influential’ becomes commonplace, however much you keep moving. And while Backdraft shows that Girls Under Glass have progressed, it also shows how external elements have, too – even within the spheres of post-punk and goth, which on the face of things, haven’t evolved all that much. Emerging bands are still emulating The Cure and The Sisters of mercy circa 1985, and oftentimes if feels as if these are genres locked in time – but then, the same is also true of punk, and contemporary grunge acts.

At least Girls Under Glass can lay justified claim to being there at the time and laying the foundation stones for the sound that endures over thirty years on, and they’re fully accepting that this new outing draws on the sound and sensations of their previously active years in the 80s and 90s. ‘Night Kiss’ brings all the synth-goth vibes where early New Order and third-wave goth acts like Suspiria meet, but there’s much to chew on across the ten songs on Backdraft. ‘Tainted’ – which features Mortiis on guest vocals – has a more industrial feel – but that’s industrial in the way that Rosetta Stone drew on Nine Inch Nails for Tyranny of Inaction than Ministry. It’s got grit and magnetic bubbling synths and some hard grooves, but the aggression is fairly restrained.

Single cut ‘We Feel Alright’ has a vintage vibe and sits in the bracket of ‘uplifting goth’ – it may not bee recognised as a thing, but it sure is, and propelled by a pumping disco beat, it’s one of those songs that brims with an energy that makes you want to raise your arms and your face to the sky as you’re carried away on the driving rhythm and expansive synths and guitars.

The six-minute ‘No Hope No Fear’ blissfully ventures into Disintegration-era Cure stylings, with a bold, cinematic approach, while ‘Everything Will Die’ is a quintessential slab of Numanesque electrogoth It’s uptempo, even poppy, but it’s dark, and if the Hi-NRG pumping of ‘Endless Nights’ is a shade cliché, but they redeem the dip with the sparse six-minute ‘Heart on Fire’ with its sepulchral synths, before erupting into an epic climax that’s like a shoegaze / synthwave take of Fields of the Nephilim.

Ultimately, Backdraft is a solid album: its roots are deeply retro, and it’s not one hundred percent hit, but it’s a solid addition to the catalogue of a band whose longevity speaks for itself.

AA

077216

A Place To Bury Strangers – See Through You: Rerealized

Posted: 18 May 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Dedestrange Records – 2nd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Initially released on vinyl for record store day, for the rest of the world who don’t own a record player or otherwise have spare cash to splash on records that cost as much as a week’s groceries, See Through You: Rerealized – containing twenty-one remixes of the songs from last year’s See Through You – is now getting a digital release.

Given just how twisted and fucked-up A Place to Bury Strangers’ records have got over the last few releases (Pinned notwithstanding), the prospect of the mangled messes that make up See Through You being remixed was a source of both curiosity and trepidation. Curious, because exactly what can you do with material this brain-bendingly off the wall, with so much noise and unconventional structures and production? And trepidation because just how fucked up is this going to be? After all, if you’ve ever witnessed A Place to Bury Strangers live, the chances are probably still haven’t recovered, and you know that things can get pretty insane without external help or interference.

There’s also the eternal question of just how many reworkings of any given song you want or need. There are no more than four versions off any one song on here, and the diversity of the remixers’ approaches means there doesn’t really feel like there’s significant duplication.

Trentmøller’s remix of ‘I’m Hurt’, which opens the album brings a glammy swagger to the song, and it feels cleaner, quite different from the original, and while the album version of ‘Love Reaches Out’ sounds like a demo version of a reimagined take on New Order’s ‘Ceremony’, in the hands of GIFT it becomes a winsome indie tune, at least to begin with, and the theme overall seems to be, contra to what normally happens with remixes, is that many of the remixers have straightened out and unfucked the songs to render them crisper, cleaner, more overtly ‘songy’. There are always exceptions, of course: Data Animal twists ‘Broken’ into a twisted dark synth effort, and as for Xiu Xiu and their take on ‘Love Reaches Out’, well. You’d expect nothing less, mind you. Ceremony East Coast revel in the racket with their murky electronic post-punk mangling of ‘So Low’, and it works well as a celebration of reverb and sonic fog.

Also notable and noteworthy are the reworkings by bdrmm and Sonic Boom: the former’s contribution, a ‘I Don’t Know How You Do It’ is a work with a sparse, minimal skeleton and misty layers overlaid to conjure a dreamy yet energetic cut that fades into rippling piano, while the latter’s immense ten-and-a-half-minute megalith is, well, a lot. It preserves the New Order vibe and polishes it up a bit, and seems to simply loop it forever. Indulgent? Well, yes, but then, it’s fitting.

It’s not until Lunacy’s ‘My Head Is Lunacy’ that were plunged into swampy hypnotic semi-ambient terrain, and it immediately precedes a reworking of ‘I’m Hurt’ this time by Ride’s Andy Bell under the Glok moniker, which is – rather unexpectedly – a work of dark, stark trance, with a thudding beat and a chunked-up bass.

‘Rerealized’ is the key to understanding this album, really. The songs find themselves not so much remixed or reimaged, but restore, to a state before all of the mess and noise and twisting and screwing and scrunching and all the rest. Despite its length, it works well. Does it improve on the original songs? No, but it definitely places them in an array of different lights.

AA

012270

A Place to Bury Strangers will bring their legendary live shows – a shamanistic experience that bathes listeners in glorious sound, crazed left turns, transcendent vibrations, real-time experiments, and brilliant breakthroughs – to the UK and Europe in May and June 2023 for the second leg of their Destroy Into The Future Tour. See full dates below:

DESTROY INTO THE FUTURE TOUR – TICKETS

19 May – Foul Weather Festival – Le Havre, France

20 May – Patterns – Brighton, UK *

21 May – The Lanes – Bristol, UK *

22 May – Furure Yard – Birkenhead, UK *

23 May – The White Hotel – Manchester, UK *

24 May – Belgrave Music Hall – Leeds, UK *

25 May – Broadcast – Glasgow, UK *

26 May – The Star and Shadow – Newcastle, UK *

27 May – Wide Awake Festival – London, UK

29 May – Wave Gotik Treffen – Leipzig, Germany

30 May – Futurum Music Bar – Prague, Czech #

31 May – Fluc – Wien, Austria #

01 Jun – Storm – Munich, Germany #

02 Jun – Vinile – Bassano del Grappa, Italy #

03 Jun – Freakout – Bologna, Italy #

04 Jun – Grabenhalle – St. Gallen, Switzerland *

05 Jun – L’Usine – Geneva, Switzerland *#

06 Jun – La Marché Gare – Lyon, France *#

07 Jun – Rockschool Barbey – Bourdeaux, France #

08 Jun – Festival Aucard De Tours – Tours, France

09 Jun – La Laiterie – Strasbourg, France #

10 Jun – Reklektor – Liege, Belgium #

* with Camilla Sparksss

# with Lunacy

GLYTSH – V.H.S

Posted: 11 May 2023 in Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

4th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a few months since we last heard from London based industrial/alternative rock duo GLYTSH, who made some waves with their first single releases – and rightly so, because they were absolute bangers: their cover on Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer’ on hinted at the original material that was to follow, with both ‘(Hard)core memory’ and ‘SAV@Ge’ kicking serious arse. They’ve been busy in the meantime, landing a live slot supporting Tom Saint in June as part of the publicity for their upcoming debut EP, which ‘V.H.S.’ gives us a flavour of.

‘V.H.S.’ – that’s ‘Vulgar Holy Spirit’ – is pitched as ‘loud, proud and kind of a sombre love song’, which Jennifer Diehl – who now goes by the pseudonym of Luna Blake when she’s in Glytsch mode – expands on as being “about a lost relationship trying to be resurrected… It’s a dark romantic tale 2.0 with a Frankenstein flavour and could be seen as the sequel to our second single – ‘Hard(core) Memory’”.

It’s another slice of savvy songwriting that does so much all at once, starting out like some clean, crisp ‘alternative’ pop – the kind of electro-goth that pretends to be menacing but really isn’t – before going absolutely raging wild, demonic screaming with a barrage of noise exploding white hot and devastating. There’s a really thick swampy low-end and the production is dense and dirty – and it’s a real asset in realising the song’s full impact potential, because it very much accentuates the sense of volume, with the drums being pushed down beneath the speaker shredding guitar… and the guitar is a wall of sheet metal and it’s a riffy as fuck and properly heavy…and yet, somehow, there are glimpses of melody, a keen chorus that breaks out from the demonic rage of the verses, which returns us to the point where we’re forced to consider that there is a keen pop element to their songs. How can it be? And how can it all happen in two and a half minutes?

There’s no time to think or dissect it: it’s hard to take in what’s going on. It’s a blur, a blitzkrieg, an in-out smash-and-grab, fast, furious, violent and so well executed.

In the wake of Nu Metal and Marilyn Manson – who rose in on the tattered mesh coattails of Trent Reznor who brought the kind of niche noisy shit that was the domain of Wax Trax! and strictly underground to a huge global audience and then took it up several notches, aggro stuff has become quite normalised, not to mention predictable – but Glytsch bring something new and unique, and it’s not just that they’re female. They present a new hybrid, and a new level of ferocity that’s absolutely terrifying.

They’re racking up radio plays already, and they’ve got world class quality howling from every pore.

AA

853686

Photo Credit: Ulrich von Trier

Listen: ‘I Can’t Imagine’ by Distorted Reality

Posted: 1 May 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

Synthpop/Industrial band, Distorted Reality has just unveiled the details of their new single, ‘I Can’t Imagine’, their first new music in sixteen years.

‘I Can’t Imagine’ addresses the idea of being in a relationship with someone for a long time while realizing the relationship is essentially over. No one wants to make the scary move of ending it. It’s a difficult and heartbreaking split because you both still love each other. In this case, however, love is not enough.

Listen here:

AA

a2972063004_10

Watch: ‘Know Your Enemy (SpankTheNun Remix)’ by SINthetik Messiah

Posted: 25 April 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Industrial bass artist, SINthetik Messiah returns with a controversial new single, ‘Know Your Enemy’.

The greatest threat to democracy in the USA is that of communism – not as a social ideology, but rather, one that is psychological in nature. In communist countries, people do not have freedoms or rights. They are modern day slaves who have been brainwashed to love their government.

But ‘Know Your Enemy’ is not about a war that is fought with a bullet, but rather, a war that starts in the enemy’s mind. That war in our minds is the USA’s greatest threat.

‘Know Your Enemy’ presents a blended sound that is inspired by EBM, Industrial Bass and Power Noise. The single also features remixes by SpankTheNun and Anthony H.
The single is available on all major streaming platforms including Bandcamp.

Watch the video here:

AA

afc8f500-a2b1-7689-10ad-4147857e5887

Listen: ‘Red Pill’ by Alien Creation

Posted: 23 April 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
1

Alien Creation returns after hibernation and consolidation with their previously unreleased track, ‘Red Pill’.  

Taken from a well-known phrase in ‘The Matrix’ movies, ‘Red Pill’ confronts the modern world and our inability to see an obvious scam in our internet-obsessed, neon-lit, high-tech society.

Lyrics in the song address the one mantra we should say to ourselves in the mirror every morning; there is a ‘scam in just about everything’ and no matter what happens in the world, someone somewhere is making money from the misery of others. “Wise Up Sucker!” Take the Red Pill and see the scam in everything.

‘Red Pill’ is a catchy tune enveloped in textured synthesized layers of hard-hitting sound carefully crafted to deliver an incredibly infectious dance track. The song probes deeply into the senses with the power of the bass drum and catchy lyrics, the driving force behind Alien Creation’s unique sound.

Listen to ‘Red Pill’ here:

AA

a2272165980_10

EXIT ELECTRONICS – believe anything, believe everything

Posted: 26 March 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Avalanche Recordings – 24th March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

believe anything, believe everything, the follow-up to LEARN THE HARD WAY, released in August 2022, is the second album from the eternally-prolific Godflesh founder Justin Broadrick aka JK Flesh under EXIT ELECTRONICS, and it is a monster. Predominantly percussion and otherwise beat-free, it’s an example of the most primitive electronic industrial noise and pounds hard at every part of your being in the most punishing and relentless of fashions. That isn’t to say it’s arrhythmic: the tracks are built around the rhythms that emerge from repetition and the way noise surges together to create form.

The capitalisation of the titles is jarring enough for a sensitive pedant like me, but the presentation is perfect for the content. believe anything, believe everything is very much an album that SHOUTS IN YOUR FACE in all capitals, with everything cranked up to overload. It’s described as ‘INDUSTRIAL MUSIC’ and it seriously is.

There’s nothing about believe anything, believe everything that’s overtly or specifically political – there are not words, and the titles, capitalised as they are, are suitably abstract in their intent. And yet believe anything, believe everything does feel political, and it feels like a discourse about being hoodwinked, about being controlled, manipulated. About differences of opinion, about division, and about everything being fucked up. Sure, I may be projecting and seeing solace in that projection, but as of an in itself, the mangled racket of believe anything, believe everything offers no solace superficially, because, quite frankly, it hurts. And this is why believe anything, believe everything feels like the soundtrack to the soundtrack to the now: we’re persistently lied to, taken for fools, subject to increasingly draconian laws and heightened surveillance while living standards drop by the day and inflation soars exponentially.

believe anything, believe everything articulates something beyond words about the bleak times we find ourselves in And still, STILL, while the fucking cunts still treat us like pricks, and rob us blind while milking the taxpayers (not the millionaire tax avoiders) to fund private interests), people back these fuckers, the Tories here in the UK and fucking Trump in the US.

Christ: we need music like this to fill our heads and wipe away the pain, albeit briefly.

Each track locks into a groove and gouges away at it with minimal variation for a relentless four or five minutes. Its power lies in its focus on force, and the impact isn’t due to dynamic range or structure, but nonstop bludgeoning.

Grinding out a repetitive pulsation, ‘YOUR LOT’ is so dense and distorted it’s both nausea and headache-inducing. The sound gets murkier and nastier and more degraded as the track’s five and a half minutes progresses. The bass blasts hard as deep on ‘HOW YOU SEE IT, IS NOT HOW I SEE IT’, before the speaker-tearing boom of ‘PISSTAKE’. It may be an illusion, but the experience is that it simply gets darker, denser, nastier and more overloafing as it progresses.

‘ACT FIRST, THINK LAST’ offers some slight variety, with a crashing, crushing rhythm and gouging synth sounds that sound like your soul being sicked down a sinkhole the size of a continent. ‘KNEE JERKS’ does go big on the beats, and they kick you in the midriff and knock the air from your body, leaving you gasping and weak. It’s a mangled churn, a thudding chud like when a laundry load had lumped together and is banging from side to side in the spin cycle, only if you’ve hearing it with your ear pressed to the washing machine door and it’s vibrating a clog of earwax you just can’t shift.

‘WHO’S YOUR GOD’ is a massive ear-blasting burst of pulsating distortion, and things really do get nasty and gnarly again, and at the abrupt halt of the last track, ‘HOW WE LOVE TO MOCK’, you’re left feeling drained, battered.

There is no response to an album like this: you just feel fortunate to have made it to the end. You’re left feeling drained and exhausted as you stare at the ceiling.

for all the emptiness – used and violated EP

Posted: 22 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

Infacted

Christopher Nosnibor

Released at the end of 2022, the latest set from for all the emptiness is only now getting a major push. As the title suggests, this five-tracker is thematically centred around themes of use, abuse, pain and pleasure.

for all the emptiness describe themselves as exponents of ‘futurepop’, which is filtered with a range of other genres like 90s industrial rock to glitchcore, ebm, and more.

Musically, the title tracks is very much in the vein of early Nine Inch Nails – which in turn took cues from Depeche Mode when they started to explore fetishism circa 86 – but the songwriting style is more akin to PIG, and mines the catchy slogan-style hook favoured by Raymond Watts. But for all of the sweat and sleaze, there’s something curiously proper about this – specifically the enunciation of the lyrics. It’s particularly curious because Jonathan Kaplan – who records as for all the emptiness – hails from Ontario, but sings with preppy received pronunciation English. And so – my brain being prone to presenting images in response to sounds – envisages a Victorian gentleman with a handlebar moustache in a wrestling leotard as he sings of being ‘restrained and dominated’. Well, it’s well-known that for all of their straight-laced appearances, the Victorians were kinky buggers, and equally, it’s the public school types who are more likely to be into ‘alternative’ sexual proclivities in modern society.

It’s by far the most immediate track of the set, as the EP veers sharply in a more industrial dance / cybergoth direction.

‘dead inside’ is overtly dance-orientated, exploiting all of the classic breakdowns and drops, and goes all-out for the euphoric anthem, which contrasts with the hook ‘please forgive me as I die, I’ve always been dead inside’. ‘sell the sins’ is a proper bass-led technoindustrial stomper, while the last track, ‘at the brink’ is more 80s electropop and reveals a more sensitive aspect: it’s the most nuanced and probably the strongest of the collection.

While it does exist very much within the domain of the genres from which it draws inspiration, there’s some interesting stuff happening here, and not just Victorian wrestling.

AA

542651

Older Entries
Newer Entries