I’ve been writing album/EP reviews for what seems like forever, but actually goes back to 1996, on my days writing for ROAR. This archive, like others, goes back as far as 2003. I don’t write as many album reviews as I used to, but they still get posted from time-to-time.
The title of this section comes from a track on The Afghan Whigs’ first album Big Top Halloween.
In this age of the music industry constantly re-evaluating and repackaging it’s back-catalogues, I guess it was only a matter of time before we saw more of this in the industrial scene. Of course, some labels and bands that I’m sure I don’t need to name have been at this for ages, but I don’t […]
It seems to be an unusual aim in industrial/IDM/whatever-you-want-to-call-it spheres to want to have any flicker of emotion other than rage and anger, although some artists do manage an impressive job of doing so, often by just the use of what would be termed soundscapes rather than including vocals.
It’s hard indeed to describe, or review, what would be termed ‘dark ambient’ in its purest form such as this. It ebbs, it ebbs some more, and doesn’t really flow anywhere except at a glacial pace. It starts out inaudibly, takes nearly two minutes to be heard… But then, when you have forty-one minutes for […]
Samarkande are introduced on their website as an apparently experimental group that create by way of improvisation, and to “break the rigidity of electro-acoustic and electronic music”. Quite what the latter point means in practice is a difficult one to answer, it seems.
It’s sometimes been hard to reconcile the two facets of Chris McCall’s output. The seemingly ultra-serious music with the joyously insane (and whisper it, *fun*) live shows, but here, somehow, we may have the missing link at last. Like some kind of mad scientist (or inventor?) anything that may work is hurled into the mix […]
As one of a seemingly great number of promising industrial acts from the US, previous releases from this act have been of such high quality, that it was perhaps a little bit of a worry that expectations seemed to be too high for their new album when it hit at the tail-end of 2008. And […]
“A blend of old-school industrial and dark cyber-tek electronics” …so says the blurb, which gave me a little more confidence in what I was about to hear when I was first passed this release. The band’s name suggested to me yet another “harsh” industrial act who were as ‘evil’ as they could be. But maybe, […]
Over the past few years, the idea of “Harsh” EBM has been a popular route to take for many acts. Usually heavy of beat, with hissing vocals (the most effective often being in Spanish), sweeping, prominent synth lines and stuffed full of samples, the big problem of late is that the genre has descended into […]
Barely any time seems to have passed since the last album, but with a change of label to Tympanik maybe moving on quickly was the best way. Either way, with an apparently growing fanbase and lots of positive press, another album as good as the previous two would hardly be a bad thing.
It’s been a while since the last truly new material from Cyanotic – debut album proper Transhuman goes all the way back to spring/summer 2005, the re-built (as opposed to remixed) Transhuman 2.0 goes back to summer 2007 – so it’s no stretch to suggest that new material has been a long time coming. However […]
It’s amazing to think just how long it’s been since the last full Collide release. Some Kind of Strange was released way back in April 2003, and the extensive remix album Vortex a year later in April 2004. That’s nearly five and a half years since the last actual new material, and while The Secret […]
It’s been a long, long time since the first Modulate demos surfaced. Or at least, it feels that way – the first promo I was passed is probably over four years old, and the DJ promo that made the act’s name, Dystopia, was covered here nearly three years back. So what has happened in the […]
The release of new Combichrist material is both a blessing and a curse for an Industrial DJ. The blessing, of course, is that it means that you generally have at least one more sure-fire dancefloor filler, the curse being that it’s only going to get more likely to see yet more Combichrist requests (seriously, folks […]
The release of this EP has long been on the cards, but due to issues at the label that were due to release it (Sistinas) that appeared to have sunk any chances of the CD actually being released, the perhaps surprising decision was taken to release it for free (but only for a limited period).
Taking the long-lived idea of the split EP one step further, Savage Lands crowbars the work of four artists from different areas of the industrial noise landscape onto one long CD – seventy-nine minutes and six seconds worth, in fact.
Tony Young doesn’t waste any time. This new album is his third full-length album in less than three years, in addition to the appearance of a remix album earlier this year. The good thing is that it isn’t simply “more of the same”, but a distinct evolution and indeed in some cases is a move […]
I think the saying goes “good things come to those who wait”. And in the three-and-a-half years since I first came across this band, their first EP is available at last. And happily, the power and astonishing control that they display over their music in the live environment is carried over well when recorded.
We last came across JP Anderson in these pages covering his last album REFrame, in which he made the jump from an unsigned, underground artist to a signed artist with an apparently ever-growing fanbase.
Contrary to seemingly popular belief, “romantic” and/or “gothic” doom metal does not end with My Dying Bride. While that band have somehow come through what might say was a critically weak patch to return rejuvenated with a couple of cracking albums, peer behind them to the numerous bands they have clearly influenced and there are […]
Before you even start listening to this CD – and particularly if you know XP8’s recent history – it is plainly obvious the band have some scores to settle. And indeed, perhaps they have – previous album HRS:MIN:SEC, while it had it’s moments, was a little derivative and at points, er, a bit soft.
