Industrial music reviews

I love this CD. Although it is dancey, it is more industrial than other "industrial" bands. It has plenty of effects and samples to keep it interesting. It is very dark but not ridiculously like Wumpscut and VAC can be. All these songs are hits. This came out before EBM lost its industrial influence and became techno music with maybe a vocoder.

Here's an overlooked and fantastic band for you. Although "Numb" hasn't done a lot of music for a band that's been around as long as FLA, their music is very powerful. I own all six of their albums (at least I think it's six unless they've done one recently I don't know about) and each album is distinctly different and unique from the previous. Starting with the self titled album 'Numb' which sounded a lot like that old feel-good 80s 'puppy' then to 'Christmeister' which in many ways was similar to the sound that 'Ministry' demonstrated in the late 80s. Then there was 'Death on the Installment Plan' which seemed to have blended the previous sounds quite powerfully and uniquely. And now on 'Wasted Sky' Numb's sound seems to have completely evolved into their own. Although the 'puppy' influence may still be there, "Numb" is a band that can be compared to no other. I could say they're like NIN, but more intensely darker, or I could say they're like FLA but more straight forward and danceable. Or I could say they're like VAC, only without all those movie samples. But none of these comparisons do them justice because they have their own sound that has to be heard by each music fan before being labeled. I think this is probably their best album (at least I think it's my favorite), but their later work on 'Blood Meridian' and 'Language of Silence' is great, great stuff too.

Hard Core Industrial. All their stuff if great. Kinda sounds like.... NUMB. Heavy Water Factory, Leather Strip, etc. Hope that helps a little

This career-spanning collection proves to be as well-rounded as the "band" is stylistically. Pigface's direction doesn't just change with each new album--almost every song here touches different genres and employs fresh ideas. Part of me thinks listening to Pigface requires a certain mood, but how can anyone describe so broad a mood to cover all of Atkins' bases? While the lyrics rarely matter, they often fit the generally industrial atmosphere. The focal point, obviously, is the band's adventurous and experimental music.

Unfamiliar ears will perk up to this overlooked goldmine of crazy, brilliant songs. The second disc with great rarities/b-sides/etc should make this worthwhile even for anyone with all of the band's material. All five of you.

Preaching to the Perverted is a collection of tunes from the collective group of musicians known as Pigface. The ring leader of this unit is former Public Image Limited drummer
Martin Atkins. Atkins has continued the tradition of P.I.L. with this umbrella group. He's also been busy with his label Underground Records. Like P.I.L., Pigface's membership his very huge with members of KFMDM, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Dead Kennedys and P.I.L. amongst former or current members.

The songs from this industrial band are some of the best of the lot. The CD comes with a bonus disc of remixes and alternate versions of some of the songs. Great fun for Industrial music fans and Public Image Limited philes.

Strongly recommended.

after some difficulty with underground inc and a year of waiting, i recieved my best of pigface in the mail today. i am happy. the thing that is striking me right now is that, if you're familiar with the genre, hearing a song you often immediately think "wow this sounds like Killing Joke" or "wow this sounds like NIN" only to learn that particular track has a collaborator from said band. and yet...its all distinctly pigface. its probably martin's drumming, one of the most underrated drummers in music today.
anyway, most of the songs are pretty great, the first disc being more solid (by design) than the second, but nonetheless. there's more than enough fantastic material here for an industrial/alt rock fan to justify purchase. trust me. it was worth the wait for me.

The technology's primitive by early-21st century standards, but its heart's in the right place. This is perhaps the first Severed Heads album that showed that you could make an album that was both pop and experiment at the same time; tracks such as '4WD' are still beautiful nearly twenty years later, even if the recordings now sound faded and lo-tech. Recommended.

Classic early Severed Heads tunes built out of strange noises and loops... mind bending, and guaranteed to traumatise any nearby listeners whose ears are only accustomed to a diet of
"radio friendly".

(Don't Be Afraid of their Name/Title!!) Recorded 1983 - 1984: Severed Heads (Garry Royall Bradbury, Paul von Deering, Thomas Temple Ellard) were piecing together exquisite collages of beats, angelic choirs, analog synths, guitar, and TAPES TAPES TAPES of utter craziness, rhythm and humor. Sometimes melodic/hypnotic and beat-oriented, sometimes blissful tape-loop trance, sometimes jittery and intense, and often all those to some degree at once. I still am blown away by this album (and "Since the Accident" (1982 - 1983) if you can find it). When I listen to it today, despite its somewhat "primitive" methods/instrumentation, I still find it RICH with sound and dense and WARM and ALIVE. You can almost picture 3 guys up to their necks in magnetic tape and odd-looking equipment. They never get mentioned as being anybody's influence but Skinny Puppy definitely dug them (Ellard provided tapes on at least one Puppy EP), and Jack Dangers (Meat Beat Manifesto) has sampled them and built entire tracks on Heads' rhythms. Their later work (especially after "Bad Mood Guy" (1987) -- tapework nearly disappears in favor of computer/synth/drum machine) can be hit and miss though there's great stuff on "Come Visit the Big Bigot" and even "Bad Mood Guy." (a couple of more recent albums, "Rotund for Success" and "Cuisine" (1991) are somewhat prettier pop and apparently out of print) More than anything, this early stuff is CREATIVE as all hell and definitely a precursor to the current wave of "intelligent dance music." If you're a lover of creative electronically oriented music (or just music, period), you should hear some of these albums, at least ground yourself in a nice bit of history. These guys really helped open up my brain in terms of appreciating musical/SONIC complexity. I LOVE MUSIC. I listen to EVERY sort of music I can (the entire range/history of jazz and classical and rock, country, blues, bluegrass, and folk traditions from all over the world) and "City Slab Horror" and "Since the Accident" will always rank as favorites.

This group isn't like Ministry or any of the hardcore industrial groups. But it isn't what I would call techno either. I guess the closest comparison to any group is Skinny Puppy before they were into the harder stuff. I liked this album a lot. Its the "greatest hits" of Clock DVA, but if you can pick up the CD _Buried Dreams_ where about half of these songs come from. My favorites are "The Hacker," which has a non-stop keyboard to move the song along, and "Sound Mirror." All of the songs have a sinister sound to it, which makes it intense in its own way. This is a great CD for those who want to try industrial without all the hardcore guitar and screaming.

DARK AND ambiant this cd is cool with alot of sampeling klanks and mello beats i really enjoy clocks work and you will to go get it NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This album has the beats and rythem that makes industrial music great. It's not hard like Ministry or KMFDM, but for continual percussion along with great keyboards, you can't ask for much more.

This is good. No, this is great. From the 1st track to the last, this CD just makes you wanna dance (it made me wanna dance!!)... Deathwish(Wishful Death) is one of the greatest remixes I've heard in awhile, being both original and listenable, which is a rarity in remixes nowadays. You can have one quality, but not the other. Techno, industrial, dance, and more industrial is represented on this CD. Lost Minds is killer, also!! Highly recommended, especially over the Death In Detroit release.

This is he greatest goth recording ever produced.Rozz Williams has a beautiful dark soul and voice,may he rest in peace.When I was in high school,I bought my first Death c.d.,well tape back then.The music gave me a certain warm,dark,lonley feeling that I really liked,and...well the rest is history.Rozz started the band when he was only 16.This is my all time favorite album.But if you want to get some other really good Christian Death recordings,"The rage of angels" and "The path of sorrows" are soulcatching.Also "The iron mask" and "Invocations" are absolutely beautiful.So to make a long story short,if you want to listen to some music that will stir up every emotion and feeling that you have,then this is your album.If after listening to this you dont fall in love with gothic music and feeling,well then you might be dead already....hopefully.

I was not sure about a Christian Death remix album when I first saw it but being a fan as well as a collecter of their music I took a chance. It was recommended to me and I recommend it to you. It is very good. R.I.P ~Rozz Williams~

This is a pretty good single if you ask me. It has 11 tracks (which is pretty generous for a single) most of them are remixes for Guilty and then there is a couple instrumentals for those remixes and then there is the demo version of Goodbye and a remix for it aswell. If your a Gravity Kills fan then you should definitley check this out.

I first heard of Gravity Kills in early 1996, when this song "Guilty" was being played on a local alternative rock station. It took a few listens before it started to grow on me some more, but I had no interest in buying the group's full-length self-titled album just yet. Now, I've got this awesome rockin' EP with the regular version and 8 remixes of "Guilty", and it also includes another great track "Goodbye" (the demo version and one remix) which I had heard from the "Mortal Kombat" soundtrack. All in all, I've decided to just keep this slammin' CD and maybe in the future, branch outward into further Gravity Kills material. But for now, this would be the absolute perfect album for blasting at high volume from your car stereo in the inner cities, man! I also recommended KMFDM and Rammstein, by the way. But that's a story for another time...

I like their techno-rock sound and they are like Stabbing Westward, Filter and NIN, and I like how they sound different every time.

'Odyssey of the Mind' maybe was the logical evolution of a band which had begun in the early 80's with a techno-industrial music with similarities with 'DAF' or later Nitzerr Ebb and which from 1991 would develop a kind of metal-industrial; with every album they added more guitars but also they worked the electronic parts better. An example of this is 'The Final Option', which is for me an example of good blending of metal and electronics and their best album ever. 'Odyssey of the Mind' does have some songs which are similar to those of their previous album: 'Metalmorphosis', 'Isolation'... but the album relies more on a metal basis which I let the fans of this type of music rate it; Engler's voice is usually much too typical (does he want to rival Pantera?) and his pose is much too stereotypically heavy-metal. Most of the songs follow a very recognizable pattern: they begin very electronic and then the metal guitars enter the game and the song ends almost forgetting its electronic elements, which are usually put in a second place dominated by the guitars. There're good songs though: 'Last Flood', 'Isolation', 'Scent' or 'Metalmorphosis'; the others are much too metal for me. The real jewel in the record is 'Alive', a very beautiful ballad and one of the best DK's songs ever. Their following album would even envigourate the metal elements leaving the electronics much aside. But new album 'Dekaydence', which features singer Engler in his new side-project sounds more like an evolution from 'The Final Option' as if the two following more-metal albums would have never existed.

The industrial pioneers released one of the albums of the year with this. Minor MTV hit Isolation isn't even the best song, as Eggshell and Metamorphosis will attest. The old industrial/thrash chesnut was taken a step further with 'the german James Hetfield' Jurgen Engler firmly at the helm, planting richly distorted riffs down over pumping industrial drum tracks. Very good, and recommended to people who like heavy music with clarity and intelligence

krupps-one of the forefathers of industrial music does it once again to push the forefront of technology against the traditional grain of industrial music. Odyssey of the Mind has to be the perfect blend of metal-machine music. look for the new krupps coming this year and jurgen's other project-DKay.com-single released in september 99 sometime.-----TO THE HILT----

Now, Die Form are one of my favorite bands, but I must say that they are treated pretty badly on this meager Cleopatra compilation. It would appear that Cleopatra only bothered to get the licensing for DF's work under the Hyperium label, and while this material is unquestionably fantastic, it is by no means the entire story. Almost completely absent is DF's back catalogue with little European indie labels like Normal, Danceteria, and Parade Amoureuse (which makes up over half of their recorded output), as well as Philippe Fichot's pre-VISIONARY GARDEN solo projects.

The two-disc HISTORIES is a much more complete overview of the band's work, so as VICIOUS CIRCLES is out-of-print anyway, let it sink into obscurity and pick up HISTORIES instead.

NOTE: I would have given this three stars, if only for the inclusion of "Masochist 2," which is a great reworking of an old DF track, but seeing as how that's available on HISTORIES as well, there didn't seem much point...

This is the only cd by this band I own, so I'm not exactly a fan... I bought it after having listened to Savage Logic, which was for me a very interesting song; this compilation contains a bunch of good songs, I don't know if representative or not of the band's long career; There are instrumental songs, others with some vocals: usually combining raw male vocals with kinda operatic ethereal female ones; these are not bad: example: 'Cantique 1', 'Masochist 2', 'Savage logic'... but the ones I like the most are the instrumental ones: 'Doctor x' is very interesting and a beautifully crafted guitar leads our ears along sinister and melancholic passages. 'silent Order' displays wonderful electronics... If you're a Die Form fan, you know a lot more about this band than myself, actually. If you liked to listen to this band for the first time, I suppose this is the cd to choose to begin with: if you love it, then you always can buy all the other cds (loads of them, really); if you hate it, then you save money trying different cds from different periods or styles of the band. If you simply like it, ( my case) then you'll have a bunch of good songs more or less representative of the band and that's all. Bye.

I don't care for Phillipe Fichot's voice.It sounds like Skinny Puppy- (which I like because there is humor to that rasping voice and his lyrics).
I admire Fichot's concept, but his singing does'nt work for me. There is a track called Kagami.. which means mirror in Japanese, I believe its sung by a Japanese woman and it is hauntingly ghostly.
My favorite songs are Cantique and Kagami.
On their album Duality, I love Rain of Blood, which is sung by Elain P.

KDC are a decent goth-industrial band on this CD. The musicianship is very good and the the sound is nice and crisp. I would have liked the guitars to have been a little louder and I wish the singer could actually sing some instead of talk or yell everything. The songwriting needs to be stronger though. Many songs started out really well, but ended up sounding the same as the previous song by the middle of it. These guys are good musicians but the song writing and maybe even the fire of their performance don't match Nine Inch Nails or Ministry's best work.

Kevorkian Death Cycle live up to their name with music that is doom laden and apocalyptic. I would compare their sound to the sort of end of the world fantasy you find in much Japanese animation (but obviously from and Audio standpoint).

It took a few listens for this album to grow on me due to the heavy electronic influence. Much of it being distanced and cold, but after a few spins the themes and emotions seep out and the ingenious nature of this album can be fully appreciated.

I've really grown to love this CD. Despite the cheesy name, this band has real chops. The tracks vary in tone from introspective to incredibly harsh. Overall, I'd describe their style as a cross between Gary Numan and NIN. It's industrial, with a strong new-wave influence.

The vocals are great; they sound almost British. The arrangements are alternately dark, weird, and lush. Some tracks are quite melodic, with a synth-pop sound not often heard among industrial bands. Others descend nicely into electro-guitar noise. A good album for long-term listening.

Thief. That is what valor is. Defying an agreement made with Rozz to not use the Christian Death name, he has spent the better part of the 80s, 90s (although he shut the hell up when Rozz put out the superb "Path of Sorrows" and "Rage of Angels" albums) and this new decade further defiling the legacy of the Christian Death name.

It must take a mighty confident, respectful man to continue to steal from someone who is now dead, utilizing a name which a 16 year old named Roger Painter came up with in his bedroom in Orange County, California. Pathetic.

From fleecing his own fanbase (remember that Christian Death "book" which he claimed to be writing back in the late 80s?) to unleashing putrid, turgid ---- such as this pretensiously titled "album" valor continues to show his contempt and creative bankruptcy. He hasn't said much about the world ending recently, now has he?

I for one am a fan of both Rozz Williams's and Valor Kand's versions of Christian Death (even though I've always thought the late, great founder Rozz was the better of the two). But with that being said... I HATE this album! I find much of Valor's previous Christian Death material creative and interesting, as he has adventurously crossed the lines of goth rock, punk, heavy metal, and experimental industrial. But this album is generic nu-metal on crack. The music has sunk to a bunch of dull "aggro" style chugging, and the lyrics have been dumbed down to a cheesy, simplistic horror shock attempt that Sevan Kand did better at the age of five. It truly seems like a complete joke to me. If you want dark, angry, heavy music, I recommend checking out bassist/female vocalist Maitri's other band Lover Of Sin instead of getting this ridiculous album. And no, I'm not just saying that because Maitri is hot and likes to show her stuff (but I certainly don't mind that).

Valor has brought Christian Death to new levels with b.a.a.c. Though the title is "born again anti-christian" the lyrics are far superior to this concatenation of a sacreligious synonym. F*cking in slow motion is my favorite song on this album; the chicks vocals are really nice and it explains the torment of the Flyers and the Flyers Mind. This is total death rock worship and anyone who digs the genre should get it or grow an ant farm. oh and cradle of filth does some stuff on it too.