Back in the 90's I used to dig me some gabber. Well, I dug a lot of things about it. What I actually really fucking hated about it was that every song had the exact same build - with only minor variation in BPMs - and the only thing that distinguished one track from the next was the rudimentary texture of abrasion layered over top. Ho hum and shit.
Dreamcrusher toy around with that abrasive overlay but don't bother with the unyielding, metronomic beats. "Vulpeculae Freeze" sounds like old Godflesh updated with modern production software, particularly in the overdrive dept... and considering Godflesh were my favorite band for a pretty good chunk of the 90's I guess that earns this track a blog entry, eh?
Trent Reznor is officially the Too $hort of EBM: retiring for good his bread-and-butter flagship Nine Inch Nails nearly three years ago to focus on filmcomposing and otherprojects, only to unapolegetically announce a comeback tour this week. What gives? Shit if I know, but "Came Back Haunted" is one of his more radio-friendly tunes in years, even though I thoroughly dug Year Zero and The Slip (Ghosts I-IV was a bit harder to take seriously).
Hesitation Marks won't be out until September 3, but you can while away that time by wondering aloud what the fuck Reznor is doing back on a major label.
[EDIT 6/30/13: added the David Lynch-helmed music vid]:
You remember Heaven's Gate, right? UFO cult... mid-90's... mass suicide. Thinning the herd, basically. Secretive UK producer Shifted is getting straight up industrial on his new project, Covered in Sand, with leaked track "Heaven's Gate Suicides" a kind of martial Bataan Death March through your dome. Along with his "solo" work, Covered in Sand is a key component of Shifted's new(ish) Avian label.
Coming off like a cross between the hip hop-informed Meat Beat Manifesto and the new wave-steeped A Split Second, "Fun to Be Had" either sounds like a groundbreaking classic or an aggro version of "Wham Rap", depending on one's post-millennial sensibilities. My own affections fall somewhere between those two extremes, but if anything these last few posts should show the widening gulf between many of the "old guard" and the new in the EBM / industrial overlap.
By 1990, many of the groups formed in the mid-80s found themselves floundering between heightened exposure of their musical niche and the skeletal, minimalist songwriting that had won them favor in the 80s but had since fallen out of style; not all, certainly, and many would rebound later with bigger budgets and forward thinking producers, but in the meantime there were plenty of stilted throwbacks like "Fun to Be Had": endearing yet fossilized, stagnant yet timeless, classic yet decidedly not...
EBM - Electronic Body Music - was largely pioneered in the early-to-mid 80s by Belgian duo Front 242 as a new wave-inspired, dance-friendly take on the increasingly mechanistic beats of industrial music. Considered by most a subgenre of industrial, it also afforded a good deal of crossover potential with the burgeoning techno movement at the end of the 80s.
A Split Second were a little long in the tooth to be learning new tricks from acid house - unlike younger upstarts Meat Beat Manifesto, for instance - so "The Parallax View" sounds like it could have just as easily come out in 1984 as 1990, when it first appeared on the Kiss of Fury album... and yet ASS' 1986 debut single, Flesh, is often cited as the first New Beat record, a short lived micro-genre that directly inspired acid house and whose most famous artist, Praga Khan, would go on to be a key figure in early rave with his industrial-tinged Lords of Acid sect.
There were some solid remixes of "The Parallax View", but since the 12" single didn't come out until 1991 I'll stick with the 1990 album version for chronology's sake.
Forging a career out of identity crisis, the fact that UK native Jack Dangers has gotten away with straddling the boundaries of industrial, techno, dub, hip hop and just about any other dance related genre you could dream up - never entirely committing to any specific genre convention - for over two decades is a testament to the man's creativity and engineering skills.
99% was the third Meat Beat Manifesto album in two years, and the second of 1990 (though that same year's Armed Audio Warfare consisted of archival recordings intended for the group's first album in 1988). "Psyche-Out (Version 1)" is a remix of a 99% album cut via 12" single, and though fairly minimal - it was 1990, after all - one can cut through the acid house tropes and pick apart a number of contemporary influences: the emphasis on original vocals, which were not prominent at all (aside from samples) in the acid house / rave movement but did have a lot in common with industrial dance groups like My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and KMFDM, or even the New Beat stylings of Lords of Acid; skeletal bass lines in an early Depeche Mode vein; a fairly sedate, almost swinging tempo, 100x removed from the frantic BPM wars of the techno genre, which was more in line with late 80s hip hop or even early 80s synth pop... the list goes on, as does the beat.
Rightfully heralded as one of the elite, most influential (electro-) industrial bands of the 80s, Skinny Puppy had long since planted their flag by the dawn of the 90s, establishing themselves as a difficult cult act with no hint of grooming themselves for mainstream success. Too Dark Park turned out to be every bit as murky and inaccessible as their previous records, but it was hard to deny by this point that their songwriting skills had improved immensely since the early minimalism of "The Choke" and "Deep Down Trauma Hounds".
Skinny Puppy - helmed by Nivek Ogre {a.k.a. ohGr) and cEvin Key - extended their agitprop aesthetic into their stage show as well, screening confrontational footage consisting of Iraq war footage and Budd Dwyer's on air suicide amongst other discomforting visuals. The music video for "Spasmolytic" was directed by obscure exploitation auteur Jim Van Bebber, who at that point was known almost solely for the hysterically violent 1988 gang war film Deadbeat at Dawn. Van Bebber and Skinny Puppy... an inspired pairing.
Interesting story on this one: sometime around 1988, following the release of their The Land of Rape and Honey album, Ministry mainman Al Jourgensen found himself with a handful of outtakes and set about brainstorming ways to get them distributed. Details are sketchy on why he chose to try to build a whole new project around them instead of using them as b-sides, but long story short Trent Reznor found himself involved a year or so prior to the release of Nine Inch Nails' debut, Pretty Hate Machine.
It seems Reznor only stuck around long enough to record vocals for a proposed cover of Black Sabbath's "Supernaut", but for whatever reason - did I mention details are sketchy? - the tapes languished on the shelves until Reznor had made a name for himself with NIN, at which point he decided he didn't want his vocals being used after all.
Debate continues to this day whose vocals made it to the eventual 1000 Homo DJs EP, but the party line is that Al Jourgensen recut the vocals in a similar vein to Reznor's and released the record as per Reznor's wishes. An authorized version with Reznor's vocals was eventually released on the Wax Trax label's 10th anniversary box set, Black Box, in 1994, but some have argued that even the original bears a heavily distorted Reznor vocal rather than a recut Jourgensen one.
Whatever, they sound similar, which makes choosing one version over the other pretty fucking pointless. It's also a lot more upbeat and dance-worthy than the usual Ministry / NIN fare, so the EP as a whole is worth checking into, though it's often overpriced considering its brevity.
Coming in at the harder, more abrasive end of the EBM sound a la Skinny Puppy, X Marks the Pedwalk lifted their seemingly nonsensical moniker from a Fritz Leiber story, which is about as far as we looked into it since WKMR are not SF fans (besides, they're German, what more do you need to know?). XMTP were the first signing to then new Zoth Ommog Records, which arguably was the greatest and most influential of the industrial labels in the 1990s, despite not surviving that decade. One could also make the case for Metropolis Records, but Cleopatra can kiss our low rent asses.
Rebounding hard after a couple of uncharacteristically abysmal albums, Killing Joke hit it out of the park with Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions. "Money Is Not Our God" was probably the most political and anthemic song they would release until 1996's "Democracy". "Is your answer yes or no to these painful truths?"
Naive was KMFDM's fourth album and their breakthrough. It was a late victim in the Sample Wars, having been taken off the market three years after release due to a belated copyright claim over the use of Carl Orff's "Oh Fortuna" in the song "Liebeslied". The album would eventually be completely overhauled and remixed - not just the offending "Liebeslied" - and re-released in 1994 as Naive/Hell to Go. In 2006, the album was reissued again with both the original + remixed version of all the extant tracks with the exception of "Liebeslied", which was included sans "Oh Fortuna" sample. Well, fuck that, here's the 1990 out-of-print original intact.
Alright, Brits have gotten enough love recently. Time to move on to some industrial.
Nine Inch Nails didn't release an album in 1990 but the singles culled from Pretty Hate Machine were just tapering off, Sin being the last and historically the least successful. So I'm reaching to include this, as it's a mere b-side to the Sin CD single, but when Trent Reznor decides to cover Queen it's worth a look.
