Whatever your opinion on Laibach, it is perhaps hard to disagree that even after over thirty years active, anything they release is at least worth talking about. Over their career they have cast their critical eye over mainstream pop music, covering fixtures in the pop canon with, er, surprising results, uncovered hitherto unnoticed totalitarian leanings […]
I've been a big fan of Armalyte's output for some time, with a whole string of great bands to get excited about (Je$us Loves Amerika, Concrete Lung, i!, Paresis, not to mention Interlock once upon a time), so it's always good when I get contacted by them with another promo to check out.
September 2013 has seen two debut albums released from bands on opposite sides of the Atlantic, that perhaps have more in common than might first be thought. Both are industrial-influenced bands, that have come from outside the “scene”, or at least that’s the way it appears (and, not to mention, both albums are self-titled, oddly […]
Of the industrial scene’s great survivors (FLA, Skinny Puppy, Front 242, KMFDM), all four have now been active for over 25 years, and aside from 242 (who seem happy with revisiting their past with admittedly amazing live shows, which is no problem for me – I’ve seen them five times in the last five years […]
It's always interesting when a new artist jumps out to popular attention. Séamus Bradd's The .Invalid has been the latest project to do this just recently, with a fair amount of ecstatic comment online from "the scene" once the album – apparently two years in the works – finally saw the light of day in […]
Usually, I guess, when you emigrate to the other side of the world, and start a new life 10,500 miles from your home city, continuing your existing band/musical project may not be high on the list of priorities as you settle down. But Ed Oxime has had other ideas after doing exactly that, with a […]
Nearly ten years since comeback album The Greater Wrong of the Right, and thirteen years since their return from the hiatus/collapse with the legendary Doomsday show, Skinny Puppy are back with their fourth album since the reformation, and after a string of ultimately disappointing albums that have seen them, at best treading water or even […]
I've found Informatik one of those bands I can't quite work out for a while now. They've been around in one form or another for some time, nowadays as Da5id Din [din fiv] and Tyler Newman [Battery Cage], and their synthpop/futurepop days are long gone, replaced with a electronic/rock-influenced direction that at points is really […]
Following on from the release last autumn of their second single, Glamourama, Blindness are now following it up with a new single – and seeing as it is being released in two different formats, I'm going to cover them both here in one review.
Front Line Assembly’s lengthy career has seen them take a number of turns, adapting their own sound and co-opting others as members of the band changed, with varying degrees of success. Their initial industrial sounds evolved enormously as technology progressed, took in all manner of metal influences in the nineties – arguably resulting in their […]
Recent KMFDM albums have followed something of a pattern, and not just in their release dates – i.e. in the Spring, every other year, for ten years now. All these years of "conceptual continuity" have resulted somewhat in a band resting on their laurels a bit, and most criminally re-using the same old ideas time […]
As I noted last week, 2012 really was a good year for music, as far as I was concerned, including a number of new discoveries.
One of the joys of being back in London has been being able to immerse myself in the tons of live music that there always is on offer (I’m not sure I really want to count up exactly how many bands I’ve seen live in this city over the past three years, for the sake […]
Many smaller labels in the industrial scene are lucky if they release one truly extraordinary album over a period of a few years, but I’m beginning to think that Artoffact are more than just lucky in picking their artists. In recent years they have released truly brilliant albums from Urceus Exit, Saltillo, v01d, and then […]
I mused for a while over whether to leave the elephant in the corner of the room here, or whether to get it out of the way first. So obviously it is going to be the latter. The Strand are, or have been at least, lumped in as a “Steampunk” band in the past. I’ve […]
Over the past few years, Sami’s electro project Faderhead have been difficult to ignore. Be it through ubiquitous dancefloor hits like Dirtygrrrls/Dirtybois or TZDV, or be it through the odd bit of internet controversy (mouthing off about other artists or coming across as a bit of an over-inflated rockstar), where it is frankly rather hard […]
Just once in a while, a reissue is genuinely of something that somehow missed a time in the spotlight the first time around, and the reissue is no naked attempt at getting the first buyers to put hands in pockets again, but instead the work of someone else trying to get the audience it should […]
Sean Payne’s Cyanotic have always been more than their reputation suggests. The first thing most people think of – that know of them at least – is their intense fusions of drum’n’bass, industrial and metal that have been the core of all of their signature songs. But all the way since they first started, the […]
Back in the 80s, Al Jourgensen was one of the driving forces behind industrial and metal coming together. The three albums released around the end of the 80s and early 90s were all incredible albums for different reasons, but all were most notable for pushing the envelope, and hard. There were scorching, stupidly heavy tracks, […]
In these times of demands for instant musical gratification, and single track downloads apparently supplanting the album, success sometimes comes to those bands that demand more than just a fleeting listen. Austria’s Mind.In.A.Box are one such band.
