Album Art for Cybervampire

Here we go again. In the words of Uberbyte: Awake, Soma. She lives again, born from my mind. We’re back for more, this time with news from Jon Andre Lundal’s project: Hatemagick‘s Cybervampire.

A very dark album that could probably be described best as Minimalistic, Down-tempo, Dark-Ambient Aggrotech, Cybervampire is Hatemagick‘s debut album, the second being Cybermechanical Antichristian Phenomenon which went out about a month later.

Perhaps I should try comparing Hatemagick‘s work to any other band out there I know, but that would be kind of rough. I must say this album is quite unique to be so minimalistic. Even though the sounds can be understood in the very first run, the sound in general intended for this album is something I haven’t heard before.

Cybervampire kicks in with its title track, perhaps the softest blended track from the whole album. It represents quite well what the album will offer the next forty two minutes: Deep, drowned beats, a low complexity synth arrangement and Hatemagick‘s personal touch: “Disconcerting synths and industrial machine-like beats that rape the soul with passion”. This album is probably one of the roughest I have ever reviewed. I have mixed feelings towards it. I can’t help getting the feel of a Power Noise album, yet I know it’s not by far like it. It shares so much with Power Noise, though, the general atmosphere it creates, the way synths blend along with the beats. Yet a couple of tracks that feature lyrics are so Aggrotech it can’t possibly be categorized as something else. Desire To Obey is a fine example on this. I would’ve loved to hear higher lyrics, they’re just too low to be heard without heavily equalizing.

Halfway through the album comes Daemonic Dream… Now that track is exactly what I was hoping to hear when Cybervampire rushed in. Faster beats plus sampled lyrics filled with anxiety. The Terror EBM – Aggrotech way. Aggressiveness everywhere around. This is were I should note: This album (and specifically this track) is totally not ok to listen while going through traffic. It makes you want to kill everyone around you. Right after Dameonic Dream comes Angels of Death. Two powerful tracks I enjoyed the most. Angels of Death serves another good example of the lyrics thing. They sound good enough, but they’re too low. Hit the 500, 1K and 2K bands all the way up and you’ll understand what I mean. Instead of whispers, they turn into ripped, harsh vocals.

There’s a catch with this though. The hidden lyrics are quite an occult thing, just like Nick Quarm stated on Brutal Resonance, referring to the second Hatemagick album. The positive part of that type of vocals is precisely its great contribution towards making the albums feel darker. As it should be, the album ends gracefully with Stars and Nebullas – a faster paced, less dark track. It keeps the album’s overall feel, yet I found something interesting on this one: Better vocals. Though very short, it’s a very good closing track.

One of those independent projects one should follow, looks like Lundal’s Hatemagick is here to stay. A nice first album that somehow reminds me of the Spanish project Dyoxide‘s first two albums, Hatemagick seems to be filled with more content to come. Certainly, I hope that it won’t share Dioxyde‘s fate and punch with it’s dark sound.

Either way: We salute you!

Painbastard at Kinetik Festival 4.0.

This is a blog dedicated to reviewing albums that mostly fall in either the Industrial or Metal categories. It was conceived some time in 2008 and founded in September of the same year. A series of circumstances, however, have prevented both of its makers to properly create and transmit opinions through reviews of albums and events they find enjoyable. Fortunately for us all (and hopefuly for you as well), blogs are forgiving creatures, and as such they are easy to pick up in order to create mayhem with them.

Enter Somatoxin.

A ground for experiments through the massive dispersion of appreciation, Somatoxin is a place where reviews from recent (and not so recent) albums find their way and float to the waters of the web. Event reviews are sporadic and are often very delayed as both authors are working students, but reviews for new albums should be up within a week after they are released, and in the case of demos/advance copies directly sent to us, they will probably find their way here much earlier than they are released.

Enjoy your stay!

Painbastard at Kinetik Festival 4.0. was taken by Ydolon.

Album Art for Perfectly Defect

Spawned from a scene different to its current, and returning with a new album six years after its predecessor, Mortiis started breathing and twitching mere weeks ago promising a new bastard. Perfectly Defect was named and massively distributed.

With its eight tracks and forty minutes of play time, Perfectly Defect brings Mortiis back with its traditional sound along with an unexpected addendum in the form of sound-driven melodies with absolutely no vocals: This is a warning/spoiler, since I have already read many people complaining about this particular aspect of the album.

With a pretty unique voice I would like to call one of my favourites, Mortiis starts Perfectly Defect with a somewhat slow and melancholic song by the name of Closer to the End. This song in particular is what the band has been all about for some time: A song reminiscent to an older era of Industrial Rock, with its powerful guitars and slow-and-yet-solid drums. Continuing the same vibe from the first song, the title track Perfectly Defect starts with an atmospheric feeling added to it, mainly created by the amount of background sampling/synthesizers and by constant crystal-clear bass sounds.

The slow pace is continued with the third track, which sounds like the soundtrack of a steampunk cantina. As this song comes to an end, so does the vocal work in the album. The moment Sole Defeat starts, the album makes an unexpected turn and becomes spectacularly ambient-like. The guitar work is there, as are the drums and the synthesizers, but the thing that drove the first three songs is completely gone.

From the middle of the album up to the song preceding the very last one, the album has a feeling similar to a futuristic story or videogame. Dark passages played in vast rooms devoid of life and filled with emotion is the vision these songs evoked in me during these four songs—songs that make up fifty percent of the album… Suddenly the end is actually very close, This Absolution brings vocals that weren’t in the first three songs in order to fill those wide empty spaces that filled the atmosphere in previous songs… and the album says goodbye.

This album caught me by surprise as its announcement was made mere days before it was released for free for everyone to download and listen. What completely surprised me, however, was the composition of the album. I will not call it bad, but half of the album was tremendously experimental, which only makes me anxious after reading the short news about a [second] new album coming next year.

6/10 The first three songs in the album are very solid, but the remainder suffered an awkward pace switch that is not easy to listen.

Album Art for Black Friday

With little over half a decade of existence, and having spawned three studio albums, several singles, and a compilation; October 2010 is seeing Faderhead unleashed once more with the new album Black Friday. Standing at a solid sixteen tracks and fifty four minutes of playtime, Black Friday promises (and delivers) fans a lot of everything good about Faderhead.

Mixing slow songs with a lot of feeling along with danceable ones with a lot of energy, Black Friday is a ride I would like to repeat over and over again. Starting with an anxiety building and ear sharpening intro, and then going straight to business with Escape from the Machine, Faderhead proves once more that loud kicks, cheesy synths, and clear ballad-like vocals is a formula for success – the latter being reiterated by Hot Bath and a Cold Razor, a pretty quick break from the previous skeleton-shaking rhythm. Being a mild Faderhead fan, these changes come as a very pleasant delivery from the artist: No wild experimentation or creepy introductions of different styles. This is Faderhead, alright.

Short and unexpectedly early, the break comes to an end as Baby Firefly starts: Painful-sounding lyrics mixed with heart-pounding kicks/snares and a series of very pleasing melodies in the form of synthesizers (‘and fly away’ indeed…). Being the first single of the album, Destroy Improve Rebuild comes next with beats that give an energetic aura that will definitely destroy dancefloors and leave grins scarred in many faces afterwards. Another contrast was created with the third calm song in the album, which proved its worth as Pussy Rules came to a start. If there was an award pricing the Sexiest Song of the Year, this song would easily win it. No contest! A song about women dominating (in a very hot way) is just what this scene needed.

Having played the third Kinetik Festival, Faderhead left a hole in my heart when a video recapitulating the journey was posted—with a background song I did not know. The hole was pretty much stuffed the moment The Way to Fuck God started, being my personal favourite in the entire album, TWTFG deserves to become a club destroyer and the kind of song people request over and over again. I might just go and request it to all the online stations I know right now…

As the album moves away from its first half, it makes things clear with a statement screaming “The party is far from over!” You’re such a… Beautiful Freak is another song I would like to label as destroyer—I might be getting a little repetitive, but this album is surely far from that: BF is another song probably aiming to conquer dancefloors. The two next songs in the album kept yelling at me “listen Blutengel and Imperative Reaction ASAP!” The Bitch I Love to Hate is another song deserving an award for being ridiculously hot, while I have never given myself the chance to listen his creations in Blutengel, the vocals Chris Pohl delivers in this song are very good. The same thing can be said about Ted Phelps’ vocals in Do You Know Who I Think I Am? – Two voices I need to check out further, especially because their contributions went by a little bit too fast… Hot though? Any day.

The end is drawing near, and the speed with which it is approaching is more terrifying than it is enjoyable. Crashkid and its ear-destroying kick drums announce the end of the ride is within sight, with the kind of energy that could be almost tasted right at the beginning of the album, the phrase Crash, burn, and die is so easy to remember I can bet it is more than enough reason to play this song live—who would not want to see hundreds of colourfully dressed people move their body while screaming that? Once again, my only regret is that this song is so purely energetic it literally makes time fly (I had to check twice to make sure it actually lasted almost five minutes).

Regaining Unconciousness is a track loyal to its title. The party is over and you are now waking up into your life once again. This is the way I feel after a great party or a tiring day… need I say more? I should not. This is a ride you must try out yourself.

8/10 The album has a very good vibe, energy, and feeling. It makes time fly away too, and is a little hard to enjoy because of this.

The title track is a very enjoyable one, which sounds like a nice mesh between Future Pop and harsher sounds. Fast synths, powerful beats and a harsh vocal work definitely make Lost Signal, Detroit Diesel’s flag track. Perhaps even after a full release. If this is a warning of a possible full length album, I can predict it will be a very good release.

The other track, titled In The City, shows a bit more of the project’s style. Same fast synths with lower-depth beats combined with a bit of sampling and slow background sounds. Both tracks show clear cycling of the same synth components, but unlike many bands out there cycling parts, these two tracks blend with the rest of the track in a very skilled way, so hearing the same sounds is never boring.

9/10. A third and maybe fourth track would’ve been awesome. Detroit Diesel’s style so far has proved to be a balanced and effective Harsh EBM formula. I certainly hope to hear more from them.

Catchy artist name: check. Catchy album name: check. Powerful synths, fast paced song, raw Harsh-EBM vocals, bass overloaded beats: We’re about to see. After a while, since Extinction Reprogrammed, Preemptive Strike 0.1 is back with their new album, titled The Kosmokrator.

Using the field-tested formula of cleanly crafted industrial sounds, plus samples and a couple of unrelated instruments, PreEmptive Strike 0.1 hits again using a more powerful combination of sounds with this release.

Basically, the pace of this album is that of many other Industrial releases. Fast paced introduction, slow paced interlude, powerful conclusion.

Kicking in with Astral God Race, PreEmptive Strike 0.1 shows pretty much what the rest of the album will sound like. Mildly heavy beats, synths covering other type of instruments and a harsh vocal style always covered back by a synth sequence. Robotic Disintegrator takes control as soon as the first track is over, this time hitting harder with charged up beats and faster synths, which blend nice with the previous tracks.

The album goes slower with the third track, which is basically a prelude to the title track. Guitar riffs jump across the track, being the only common sound in the album. The Kosmokrator, ruler of space. This track that had to be way better. Even though it’s the title track, the beginning punch of the album shows way more quality than it. A good track, though eclipsed by the previous ones.

The interlude of the album starts with Interstellar Threat, seconds after The Kosmokrator. Just like any respectable band making tracks about extraterrestrial intelligence, the track starts with the typical “Breaking news announcement”. Recovering from the previous calm tracks, it punches straight through with bass loaded beats and speedy synths. Definitely, a key track that must be heard carefully.

Introducing the conclusion of the album, Al Azif serves the introduction of Proteus Prayers. Both tracks’ trademark are definitely the background chants, gorgeously blended with the rhythmic Harsh EBM style of the album. After Plan X From Outer Space, the remixes by FGFC820, Lamia, C-Drone, ESC, Mesmer Eye’s and Alien Produkt punch in, some of them particularly notable.

8/10. An evolution from Extinction Reprogrammed, The Kosmokrator is a nice addition to PreEmpitive Strike 0.1′s discography. Great tracks meshed with too slow tracks without the quality of the previous ones break a bit on the album’s continuity. Nice introduction, not that great interlude, good conclusion.

Album Art for the En Theos EP

I seldom listen to bands falling in the Grindcore genre, but after making it clear to myself that there is some really nice music out there pertaining to it, I decided to pick an album and see what happened.

UK’s Unnatural Selection and their En Theos EP happened.

Standing at little over fourteen minutes with eleven tracks in it, after listening it once I felt the album was a little forced and slow, but after getting to the fifth track I could feel an endless lake of rage boiling inside of me (no, really).

With a pretty long introduction considering the average track length (little over a minute), anxiety grew in me as the music itself came to a start. Killer drums and guitars set to literally screamed vocals is the way Unnatural selection does things and the way a lot of bands should. The EP reaches high levels of violence by its fifth track and does not back down until the very end. This is pit music. This is violence.

6/10 Small and furious, but the three sample-based songs are a little too long.

Interested? Get the EP from their Bandcamp for free.