Labels: Armalyte Industries
Review by: Rob Woodcock
The good: nice use of Broadrick-style programming. The bad: reminds me of Pitchshifter
Not the early Pitchshifter of Submit and Industrial but the later day reinvented sounds of “Genius” and “wizzywig” or whatever the fuck they called it. Throw in some Fear Factory “New Breed” esq gabba beats now and again and you’re somewhere close to learning what Concrete Lung sound like.
First track “intravenous” is more of a taster with it’s brooding soundscape and processed doom beats. Second track “The Outer Circle” starts off promising enough with a drum pattern that could have been lifted straight from “Streetcleaner” but promptly turns into a dodgy gabba stomp and the band stick with that formula until the albums 5th song “Mind Eraser”. This is actually pretty good with more Godflesh style drumming and it’s Big Black styled buzzsaw guitar attack but then the singer starts rapping and yet more 6th form gabba kicks in, and by 6th form gabba I mean just that, the stuff I’d hear in the common room at school like Rapefist and Skullhead.
I really want to like this cd. I appreciate to the full extent the amount of time and effort that go’s into sequencing and using computers in a live set up, but I like my industrial to sound more organic and Concrete Lung are processed to fuck and way too polished for these ears. Oddly enough second to last track “Dead in the Mind” does just that with it’s eastern strings and repeated chants of it’s title but then it’s back to the gabba beats again and it’s all over.
I know some people who’ll be bang into this and I’ll be passing a reccomendation their way, sadly this just isn’t for me.