Tracks: October 7th, 2024

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October is in full swing, which means that we’re now within reasonable range of year end to start thinking about our lists. Yeah, there’s still a lot of records to come, and plenty we need to revisit, but honestly we find that starting to casually think about what our favourites are mid-Fall helps when the hammer comes down a couple weeks before year end. Will there be a dark horse number #1, or a surprising rise from the early spring to the top honours? Who even knows at this point, but we’d love to know what you think the best of the year thus far is in the comments below. On to Tracks!

Rue Oberkampf

Rue Oberkampf, practiced in the Weirding Way.

ACTORS, “Object of Desire”
As much as the rock and live band feeling of the ACTORS catalogue is an important of the band’s identity, there’s always been a strong synthetic pulse beneath the surface of the Vancouver quartet’s material. New single “Object of Desire” brings that way up to the front, not only through some very strong programming, but through the way that voices, drums and guitars are processed and reconstituted, making the band’s grand pop sensibilities all the more menacing and discomfiting in the process.
Object of Desire by ACTORS

Ultra Sunn, “Stories”
Steady gigging has helped to cement how strong a statement of arrival Ultra Sunn’s US was earlier this year, and the Belgian duo is continuing to play the hot hand with a new single. Some italo flourishes atop classically chunky and rubbery body music rhythm programming will likely be the first thing folks notice on the dancefloor, but there’s also a solidly structured tune and structure guiding the whole thing, pointing to the band’s obvious facility with classic 80s pop.
Stories by ULTRA SUNN

Cardinal Noire, “Diatribe”
We’ve been pretty excited to hear more from Finnish electro-industrialists Cardinal Noire, especially as it comes in the form of a new album via Artoffact Records. Like all of their best work, the songs we’ve heard from the duo have been indebted to the Vancouver school, but spiked with a specifically rough edged version and European take on the sound, reflective of their side-projects like W424 and Protectorate. “Diatribe” absolutely slams, and has us very keen on the forthcoming “Vitriol” for late year honours.
Vitriol by Cardinal Noire

Rue Oberkampf, “Solitude (Buzz Kull Remix)”
Icy German darkwavers Rue Oberkampf have been releasing a string of singles in anticipation of new EP Essenz, “Solitude” being the latest of which. The tight and shuddering programming of the original itself already has plenty in common with the most recent material we’ve heard from Aussie expat Buzz Kull, and so tapping him for a remix must have been a no-brainer. Relaxing the tenser muscles in the original into a chiller, trance-styled state offers a nice inversion of the drama baked into Julia de Jouy’s vocals, and should appeal to fans of recent Bite releases.
Solitude (Essenz Version) by Rue Oberkampf

Harsh Symmetry, “Stained Glass”
This new cut from Harsh Symmetry finds the LA project cashing in some of the chits its earned via the austere style of coldwave it’s plied over the past few years. When the minimal synth structures which have been the project’s bread and butter are built up with some chilly new wave guitar and a real grab the brass ring composition, the time Julian Sharwarko’s spent playing it cooler pay off wonderfully.
Stained Glass by Harsh Symmetry

modebionics, “Flesh Hardware (demo)”
We’re unabashedly into the classic electro-industrial stylings of San Antonio’s modebionics, and the steady flow of material has been really bracing of late. The roots sound is one that has come in and out of style in recent years, but the stripped down way that Rolan Vega approaches the sound cuts right through to its core appeal; mechanical cybernetic noise, complete with samples, processed vocals and those drums that hit just so.
Flesh Hardware (demo) by MODEBIONICS

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The March Violets, “Crocodile Promises”

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The March Violets - Crocodile Promises

The March Violets
Crocodile Promises
Metropolis Records

Crocodile Promises is a record arriving with no small amount of history and baggage. Not only tasked with maintaining the warm reception original Leeds legends The March Violets received in 2013 with Made Glorious, their first formally presented new material in nearly 30 years (though by happenstance their first LP), it also faces the difficult proposition of being the band’s first work to not feature the signature voice of Simon Denbigh, who has stepped back from the band since suffering a stroke in 2016 (though it should be noted that Denbigh contributed lyrics to Crocodile Promises). Whether through conscious intent or organic process, the resulting LP is a decidedly understated on, eschewing both the bombast of the band’s early incarnation and the filigreed, vaudeville excess of Made Glorious for an even, slow burn of mature, autumnal goth rock.

In many cases, that savvy approach reflects the Violets’ tenure and its ins and outs pays off, as on the less-is-more, up and down riffing and sing-song style of “Mortality”. Elsewhere it leaves the band lacking, as on “World Away From Kind” which never rises above the station of its mid-tempo plod. But those misfires are the exception rather than the rule, and while they’re playing it cool for much of the record, it has its frantic moments as well. The dead simple drum programming and skittering post-punk guitar on “Virgin Sheep” is right in the same pocket as any number of classic Violets singles.

It’s a record, then, where the subtleties of production and songwriting are often the difference markers. The chimes which ornament nodding pre-release single “Hammer The Last Nail” are reflected in Rosie Garland’s task on that track and the rest of the album in handling all vocal duties, that of carrying the punky directness that still lies at the foundation of the March Violets’ sound, yet lending the proceedings just enough otherworldly gothic mystique. Sometimes that balancing act is accomplished lyrically, as on the linking of family trauma and gaslighting to mythic imagery on “Kraken Wakes”.

Despite the nostalgic kick the prospect of a new March Violets record still carries for goth greybeards, the band are doing a solid job of putting out material which speaks to their here and now, with enough organic connection to their roots to still feel like the same band despite line-up adjustments. And hey, speaking of line-up adjustments, getting none other than William Faith to pinch hit on some songwriting is as good a way as any to link the past to the present. Whether this incarnation holds or morphs into yet another era, Crocodile Promises brings more than retro kicks for their own sake.

Buy it.

Crocodile Promises by The March Violets

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We Have A Technical 527: Who Can Resist

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Ars Morideni

Shadowy folk on a shadowy screen: Ars Moriendi.

After dalliances with the meaning of goth and post-punk royalty, we’re back to what brought us to the dance on this episode: obscure industrial releases scant few people are aware of. We’re talking about Jean-Luc De Meyer’s science fiction odysseys with 32Crash, and the strange path German collective Ars Moriendi took in linking classic industrial to powernoise. All that, plus some Cure (sorry, more post-punk royalty) and Pixel Grip talk. As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, download directly, or listen through the widget down below.

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Bill Leeb, “Model Kollapse”

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Bill Leeb
Model Kollapse
Metropolis Records

Bill Leeb’s creative output has always been defined by collaboration, both in his main outlets Frontline Assembly and Delirium, as well as his countless side-projects. The announcement of the electro-industrial maven’s first LP under his own name naturally led to a lot of questions, namely whether it would be a proper solo LP with Leeb handling the lion’s share of the writing and production, or whether it would be in partnership with new or existing creative foils.

Model Kollapse is very much the latter, with the album being credited to Leeb and the production duo of Dream Bullet, one half of which is longtime FLA contributor and former live guitarist Jared Slingerland, plus some additional contributions from Rhys Fulber (Leeb’s current and most consistent counterpart) and Jason Corbett and Shannon Hemmett of ACTORS and LEATHERS. Additionally the mix and the master come courtesy of Greg Reely, whose technical contributions to the Front Line discography are no doubt responsible for large amount of its character and continuity.

With that established, the next natural question is what sets this record apart from FLA, or Noise Unit, or any of the other releases Leeb has put out in recent years. The answer isn’t especially clear from multiple listens. It has the same sleek ultra-modern sound as all of his contemporary albums, and the songwriting and vocal performance don’t deviate from what you would expect from him in 2024. If there was some specific idea or principle guiding the record’s construction from an identity standpoint, its not easy to pinpoint. In a recent interview Leeb stated that the record was largely conceived as he was working on the material for the Cyberaktif comeback, and while basking in the positivity of his tour with Ministry and Gary Numan, factors that suggest some desire to make music for his own satisfaction more than to reinvent his sound or push its boundaries.

And really that’s what you get: if you’ve heard Mechanical Soul or Deviator, you’ve basically heard most of what this record has to offer. That’s not a bad thing, those records have their adherents, but it is notable in that Leeb’s career has largely been one of reinvention and trying different musical styles on for size. The Initial Command and Millenium and Airmech are all significantly different versions of Front Line Assembly, just as those early ambient Delirium records bear little resemblance to the crossover worldbeat successes that were Semantic Spaces and Karma. Even if you hate his records that were drawing from the sounds of the day like FLAvour of the Weak or Echogenetic, you couldn’t fault him for just doing the same thing over and over. So it feels a little weird to realize that in 2024 he seems to have settled into a distinctive but samey post-EDM version of electro-industrial – the specifics vary here and there, but the overall design, the songs and the feel don’t. Model Kollapse is very well made from a technical standpoint, but it has nothing new to offer, no identity of its own. You could reasonably argue that Leeb doing Leeb is actually what you should expect from a record under his own name, but when it seems like that’s what he’s been doing in his other projects anyway, it renders the point kind of moot.

That said, it’s not a record devoid of intriguing elements by any means. Opener “Demons” uses some clever push-pull in the drum programming to underline its fast-moving bassline, a trick that also appears on “Pinned Down”, where it gives dimension to its chunky use of guitars and melodramatic breakdowns. There’s also the use of Shannon Hemmett as a vocalist on both “Terror Forms” and “Muted Obsession”, mirroring and contrasting Leeb’s robotic delivery on the former and providing some melody on the latter, a song that is one good hook away from being a really good, settling instead for pleasant. That latter issue is endemic to the record as a whole; you can find plenty of substance in its production and programming, but none of the songs have much to hang your hat on beyond the basics, one a bit faster, one slower, one heavier, one more textural.

That may or may not be an issue for the average listener; on our commentary podcast for Front Line Assembly’s classic LP Tactical Neural Implant we opined that most of Bill Leeb’s output is more about style then it is about songs in the classic sense. Whether or not you agree with that assessment, Model Kollapse does at least feel of a piece with other recent Leeb records in terms of the quality of its construction. In some ways that does make it very much a perfect example of the great maestro of electro-industrial’s modern work; whatever the project, and whoever is along for the ride, it sounds like Bill Leeb. Your enjoyment of the record will hinge on your interest in his very specific, very characteristic take on electronic industrial music.

Buy it.

Model Kollapse by Bill Leeb

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Tracks: October 1st, 2024

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We alluded to feeling as though we were letting the industrial and EBM side of things down a bit on the podcast between some goth navel gazing and Joy Division/New Order reflection of late; we’re hoping that this past weekend’s Portion Control commentary and this (purely accidentally!) heavy hitting suite of new tracks tides people over ’til we have a rivethead-friendly podcast later this week.

Potochkine being so continental

ESA, “Rats Come Together”
Jamie Blacker don’t miss. The ESA mastermind has been exploring further musical boundaries in his contemporary material, and done a crack-up job in combining genres, ideas and production styles into noisy new forms. Check out this new joint “Rats Come Together” – you’ve got some rhyhtmic noise, big gothic organs, snatches of jazzy bass and drums, processed guitar riffs and a wild-ass melodic breakdown that you won’t hear coming. Never predictable, always boundary pushing stuff from one of the most consistent acts we’ve covered since the site’s inception.
Rats Come Together by ESA

Dancing Plague, “Days Of Heaven”
While the vocals and lyrics on the latest from Portland’s Dancing Plague are in keeping with the absolutely grim ethos Conor Knowles has built up around the project, it’s hard not to latch onto the brighter threads in this new number and tap your toes at the very least. Club-focused darkwave has been part of Dancing Plague’s pitch since the project came across our radar, but this borders on the sort of euphoric linking of trance and synthpop which we’ve heard the likes of Body Of Light mine for the last few years.
Days of Heaven by Dancing Plague

Swærm, “Worm”
The title of this new cut from Scottish producer Swærm is instructive – the squirm of its bassline and the grimy percussion and pads which smother it connote a subterranean squirming which doesn’t detract from its flood-ready immediacy. Coming to us via Up North Records, it’s bracketed by similarly sickly body music from the likes of Meshes and Spinal who’ve carved out similarly uncompromising reps with us; Up North’s Northern Nightmares comps are always fantastically curated and should be on the radar of anyone looking to flesh out EBM sets.
V​/​A – Northern Nightmares IV (UNR013) by Up North Records

Potochkine, “BI”
Always nice to have something new from French darkwave/synthpop act Potochkine, who were a staple of our DJ sets a few years back with their debut LP Sortil​è​ges. Where that album felt very much like an update of classic European darkwave sounds, the vibe we’re getting from “BI” is closer to the modern electro take on the sound. It’s also a more harried and insistent than we expected, a change-up that has us intrigued as to where the duo are headed musically in releases to come.
BI by POTOCHKINE

Ottoman Grüw, “Under My Skin, I Carry Your Bones (Feat. Prophän)”
Here’s some pitch black yet precise and satisfying (dare we use the term “functional”?) TBM from Brussels’ Ottoman Grüw and delivered to us by (who else?) X-IMG. The smokey atmospheres that swaddle just about every moment on the Womb tape are the real distinguishing characteristics of cuts like this one, aided in its evocative aims by Moroccan artist Prophän.
Womb by OTTOMAN GRÜW

XTR Human, “Abgrund”
Another banger from Germany’s XTR Human, hot on the heels of the excellent SCHRANK, one of our fave releases of the year to date. We caught Johannes Stabel doing vocals for INHALT this past summer, and were duly impressed by his presence and energy on stage, something that immediately came to mind while listening to “Abgrund”; the track’s speed and aggression are easy to latch onto, but the personality that Stabel brings to the table as a vocalist gives the track a lot of its personality.
ABGRUND by XTR HUMAN

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We Have A Commentary: Portion Control, “..Step Forward”

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Portion Control - ..Step Forward

This month’s commentary podcast dives into the often overlooked mid-period work of synthpunk pioneers Portion Control. Having an outsized influence on countless EBM and industrial acts, the band’s more melodic movements into “post-industrial” with plenty of dalliances with synthpop and post-punk are perfectly captured on ..Step Forward. As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, download directly, or listen through the widget down below. 

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Haujobb, “The Machine in the Ghost”

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Haujobb - The Machine In The Ghost

Haujobb
The Machine In The Ghost
Dependent

Every record by venerable German industrial duo Haujobb is a world unto itself; a self-contained assembly of atmospheres and structures that fit together in precise fashion. While each release can be listened to as a hermetic experience, one of the great pleasures of digging into a new record by Dejan Samardzic and Daniel Myer is tracing the path between each musical reincarnation. To wit; you don’t need to have spent a lot of time examining the last two Haujobb LPs (2011’s New World March and 2015’s Blendwerk) to enjoy the long awaited The Machine in the Ghost, but having done so reveals more dimensions in its design, and the specific way it articulates their vision of electro-industrial music.

With that in mind, the rubric by which the record is most easily understood is as a meeting of the band’s contemporary focus on analogue sounds, and the sleek, digital production of their late 90s and early 2000s output. A Möbius strip of sorts, it finds Samardzic and Myer taking the mechanical precision of their latter records, and feeding it back into the cybernetic worlds of their original run of LPs, with much of the album’s most intriguing ideas emerging directly from the ways in which those worlds do and don’t interface cleanly. The sound of a track like “Uselessness” illustrates the approach wonderfully: it starts as a slice of deconstructed electro where Myer’s vocals are orbited by a minimal arrangement of field-recorded clanks, hisses and analogue blips that eventually coalesce into a full-bodied chorus and melody, each shift between sections feeling like an image coming into focus before derezzing again. The appropriately titled “Opposition” stands in contrast to the latter song’s harmonious construction, with a claustrophobic assembly of detuned and atonal synths, its grainy pads in particular hearkening back the project’s previous focus on grimy, cyber-noir sounds. A guest vocal from Black Nail Cabaret’s Emese Arvai-Illes that might otherwise have felt smooth comes across as uneasy in this context, a stark contrast to the easier and lusher placement of similar vocals from Arvai-Illes on Architect’s phenomenal 2013 LP Mine. Both songs are vintage Haujobb and entirely new in ways that speak to a unified and intentional approach to creating (and subverting) the most basic musical binaries; minimalism taken to its most grandiose, melody reinvented through discord.

It’s that linking of motorik machinery and murky malaise which makes The Machine In The Ghost something of a spiritual follow-up to New World March (again, linked back to some of their most cyberpunk moments). Even when it seems to take a page from the icy kling-klang programming of Blendwerk, the directness of much of that record is skewed, bent, and refracted in myriad ways. Take the programming on “Under The Gun” – its spidery crawl is offset by a tumbling rumble of secondary, rubbery beats which belie the ostensible nimbleness of its lead. As with other moments on the record, it also finds Myer’s vocals in the sort of listlessly reflective croon which remains one of Haujobb’s defining characteristics. Similarly, “The Internation” adds extra suction and swampy weight lent to pinging machinery, like Kraftwerk playing at the bottom of a deep sea oil rig. In a different vein, the sparse “Singularity” somehow manages to find a connection between the downtempo moments on underrated masterpiece Polarity and both Myer’s voluminous dark techno work and Samardzic’s solo analogue body project DSX.

As we’ve said when writing about Haujobb in the past, there’s a special sauce, a je ne sais quois that not only differentiates the band from their ostensible peers (how many bands who got their start on Off Beat are still releasing worthwhile, let alone legitimately challenging and progressive records?) but also the various other projects Myer and Samardzic have a hand in. As a result, the only truly valid point of comparison for a Haujobb record is other Haujobb records, and The Machine In The Ghost indicates that there are new mutations, further abstractions, and deeper frequencies to explore. Recommended.

Buy it.

The Machine in the Ghost by Haujobb

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We Have A Technical 526: Maniacism

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Peter Hook

Having just seen Peter Hook & The Light, we’re spending this episode discussing not just Hooky’s presentation of the Joy Division and New Order catalogs, but also how our thoughts and feelings about those two bands have changed over the past thirty years. By equal measures we’ll be getting into the nitty gritty of JD/NO lore and ephemera, but also wrestling with what has and hasn’t changed about ourselves since we first came in contact with music which has never lost its gravitational pull upon us. We’re also talking about some possible Tear Garden news. As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, download directly, or listen through the widget down below. 

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