After moving to Germany for a year to promote their music at the best and after extensively touring with KMFDM, Frontline Assembly, Front 242, Angespit release, for the new label Black Pill Red Pill (available in the U.S. on Metropolis Records and on Darkest Labyrinth in Japan), their new album HIDEOUS AND PERFECT. Available in Europe and Australia as a luxurious three gate fold wallet with a 16 page booklet and a folded poster containing the lyrics on its rear, HIDEOUS AND PERFECT shows the band at their best bringing to their fans twelve new tracks. Listening to the album a couple of times I was amazed by how the duo balanced the distortions with the sampled handmade percussions (they recorded much of the album's pounding industrial percussion at an abandoned shipping yard in Sydney Harbour) and electronic instruments. The sound is powerful but always in control, there's no compression and the female/male vocals along with the granitic guitar riffs give to the sound a great effect. Angelspit industrial electronic sound is an intelligent blend of melody, rhythms and energy impossible to ignore. With this version of the album you'll be able also to enjoy their visual vision where DestroyX incarnate a cyberpunk Japanese doll and ZooG a "Clockwork orange" dandy...

A lot of music reviewers as well junkpunk lovers and Alec Empire-ian universe's satellites gave this uk aggro-industrial band a warm welcome after the issue of their premiere full LP, entitled Seethe, two years ago, even if their style's partially inspired by the harshest side of digital punk, which someone considers as an agonizing glamorous trend - maybe that's the reason why there are so many references to zombies... -. This is partially true as you could easily recognize some influences of mid 90's industrial bands such as Atari Teenage Riot or Dan Gatto's Babyland, but they show a trespassing musical personality (even if someone could argue that zombies lost their soul!) even when they throw stereotyped massive noise walls joining them to some bangings from recognizable drum machines and emulators. And the proof that this foundation (not intended for vegans and pro-clerical people) shows more than a wide assortment of bangs, clangs, lasers and bleeps is given in this EP. The favourite shooting target of these famished digital punksters seems to be the hypocrisy of religious organizations and organized religions, a smashing invective screamed by The Juddaman - lovely according to an unpredictable response from our ears ,the way he chooses for growling, shouting and tweaking "God"! - in the lyrics of Godless (it's reasonable you'll scream "we don't need your sins, we don't need your god, we don't need your lies,... " as if possessed after repeated listenings... it's just a temporary possession, mummy and daddy!), an ass-shaker virulent danceable track which it's going to be played by a lot of djs selecting this kind of stuff for their followers. Godless has been so appreciated that these butchery's fanatics decided to run a remix contest on their website. In Purging Ep, you could listen three of the remixes they received from their fanbase. The Ladder one is the most danceable (a sort of techno-ebm-march with a rough distortion on an alarm sound...), the Digicore one shows a punkey set on a sort of jungle which is soon covered by the sound of a distorted guitar and by violent kickin' grape-shots, while the Multi-Panel one has a strange weirdy appeal with an astonishing mumbling chord. We really appreciated the lyrics of Victims, reminding the brutal assassination of Sophie Lancaster and her boyfriend Robert Maltby, a famous murder case in Great Britain, as they were killed just for their attachment to the goth way of wearing. Victims is not the first tribute to these victims - one of the first to write a song ("Illusion") for them was Ronan Harris by VNV Nation -, but we agree with the intent of denouncing one of the most frightening example of social intolerance. Different interpretations could be given to the words of Fucking Sick, demostrating the lyricist knows the tricks of the trade quite well! The most intimate tracks of this ep are Septic and You Made Me Suffer, the latter of which has something morbid reminding to us a mixture of Sonic Youth and Starfish Enterprises covered with a slighlty digital sauce. After listening to this good ep - you'll never hear any tracks from it on Vatican radio...we're almost sure about that! -, you'll have a persuading explanation of the reason why they shared the stage with most famous names of the scene such as Sheep On Drugs, Caffeine Kill, Angelspit, Das Ich, Funker Vogt, Killing Miranda and many others. Hurry up if you're a cd maniac disliking digital downloads as the CD version of Purging is available as a limited edition run of 300 individually numbered copies.

After the issue of an omonymous cd-single, which has been hugely appreciated by EBM indomitable lovers, the album by the Anglosaxon (just a synthetic way to say they're half German half "Anglische"...and just to remark their double roots they sing using both languages...an unusual aspect for this kind of stuff!) band V2A starts with a suffocating introduction, a sort of war declaration for the intestine battle against decay hieratically ordained by the scraping filtered voice coming out of Kevin Stewart. The gears surrounding this Mechanized Infantry sound like a nice playset appearing like a soiling of a lot of past danceable acts. In spite of references to the inventory belonging to band such as Covenant, VNV Nation, Combichrist and Suicide Commando, this records is not inteded neither for nostalgic people nor for "romantronic" spoons weeping for new wave necrotic sing-songs as it's able to inject brand new stimulations to all those dancers wearing gas masks and "gummyplasticous" overalls even if sometimes it looks they drink from lyrics pushing the dark pagan scene as a source for inspiration! That's the reason why the weakest ring of the heavy chains bolted by V2A are lyrics, while from the other side compositions and rhythmical patterns are well-forged as they perfectly fit to the wide range of motions (of bodies and souls) for people attending ebm parties. Flushing meadows of pushing beats, aggressive kicks, metallomelodic sequences, harsh sounds and even a set of flaming laser-like sounds - have a listen to the hissing Mechanizm just to chew that solid imaginary set! - as well as captivating dance-songs scattered with convulsive beats such as Contagen, Demons and Electro Whore (just a whispering vocal anthem like "love like an angel, fuck like a whore" perfectly fits a fetish party!) are going to set you on fire! In tracks like Stahl-Tanz (steel dance!) or aggro-tech with gummy kickdrums tracks such as Jesus Loves You (which reminds some acts of Angelspit) or Kill -9, the basslines and the hard kick seems to be the soundtrack for the frenzy dance of mechanized spiders. A countdown from 9 to 0, a persuasive song repeating "you're demons" intended for dancers with potential identity crysis, filtered basses sounding like electric saws, cranioclastic rushing rhythm make this chunky album danceable from the beginning to the end and the length of each track (no more than 4 minutes...) is the most reccomended by djs playing for dark dancehalls among steel chains, Mad Max-like haircuts and black skin boots. When you'll finish listening to (or more presumably dancing on...) V2A's last work, you'll have more reasons to agree with their beloved statement. EBM is not dead!

Hardwire is one those industrial-metal bands that are in it for the long haul. They formed back in 1999 in Arizona and have been active ever since, although their release schedule hasn't been as prolific as one might think.
Hardwire embrace the impactful industrial-metal verb of bands like KMFDM, Die Krupps, Skinny Puppy and Rammstein heavily relying on huge walls of distorted guitar riffs and bombastic hammering metallic rhythic patterns. Instead of using the same old and boring filtered EBM-type singing or the more spoken word vocal style of Rammstein or Laibach, these four desert lads adopted the quasi death metal vocal style that resembles that of Fear Factory (who are also a pretty prominent influence in their songwriting process).
"Konflict" is their second full length non-CDR album release and except for the four opening tracks, "Konflict" is pretty much a remix album, with pretty impressive interventions by Die Krupps (if you are a long time fan of Die Krupps like myself, you'll totally recognize their contribution and style), Angelspit, C/A/T, En Esch of KMFDM/Pigface, X-Fusion, Kreign, Caustic and Collapsed System.
Needless to say it's a great album to have if you are into heavy industrual-metal.

Australian duo Angelspit are very talented and committed: how else would you call a band that relocates to Berlin for one year just so they can make sure they play every possible venue and festival of what once used to be EBM's epicenter (and obviously still has a big electronic scene)? Before that they had already toured the US with Cruxshadows as well as opened in Australia and New Zeland for some of the greatest electro-industrial bands on earth (KMFDM, Frontline Assembly, Front 242 etc).
It seems natural that given these kind of efforts going into the live side of things, you can expect kick ass recordings from their time in the studio. Heavy and pounding beats, mighty supporting bass lines, scorching saw-tooth waveforms, brutal zaps, chemically infectious vocals (treated but not just distorted the old way). These sonic industrial cyberpunk attacks remind me Skinny Puppy's latest record and come with the amazing frantic chopped up production that you can find on breakcore/IDM records that Hive records would put out or on great records like Moldover's full length debut.
This is electro-industrial music at its best: this is probably what the new EBM is or should be now.