One of my all-time favourite albums, all genres. This particular
album would probably fall under the genre of techno-cyber-EBM-industrial,
fast and pumping or slow and heavy stomping.
All the songs are
so incredibly excellent, I love them all. Very cyber, very hi-tech, great
movie samples, SFX, synthetic voices... It's so much better than
Caustic Grip which (surprisingly) was released
earlier the same year. How did they get so much better in so little time?
The vocals range from weak nearly-out-of-tune hissing to deep dark
powerful growling to super-synthetic vocoded, depending on the song and
lyric content. The lyrics, by the way, are usually FLA's weakest point, but
here even they seem fairly well-crafted, with hi-tech or cyber themes. True,
by 1992 the whole cyber thing was kind of old and tired (and even more so these
days), but if you're going to do a 'cyberpunk' album, this is the way to do it.
(Former member Michael Balch in an interview I saw once in a 'cyber' TV show:
"'Cyberpunk'? Is that what you call the music we've been making all these years?
We called it 'techno' or perhaps just 'music'." By the way, where is Balch these
days?)
For those interested in FLA and their non-FLA activities, there are heaps
of bands or side projects to check out. On this particular album, FLA was Bill
Leeb and Rhys Fulber. Leeb/Fulber has also worked together under the names
Delerium (gothic ambient
turned techno-trance turned
Enigma-ambient-pop),
Intermix (techno),
Noise Unit (techno-EBM) &
Synaesthesia (techno-trance-ambient).
Leeb was once in the legendary techno-industrial-EBM band
Skinny Puppy, and he worked with some of them
again under the name
Cyberaktif. Fulber had a side project
called Will, but I think that's
dead now.
