Active during the nineties with Front Line Assembly (check "Caustic grip", "Reclamation" and "Four Fit"), Decree and Will, Jeff Stoddard formed Roughhausen in the new millennium after he moved to Thailand. There, he recruited John Wu (a veteran of the Taiwanese rock scene and highly acclaimed studio musician), and Miss Lin (a veteran of the Asian death metal scene) and started working of his new sound. THE AGONY OF THE BEAT is the third album of the band and it contains songs written during the 2005÷2008 period that have been recorded in Canada and Thailand. The music, which goes to a blend of cyber e.b.m. to industrial metal, is frequently mixed with hyper distorted vocals. The will to keep every melody under a thick layer of distortion doesn't affect all the track list as things change with the newest songs that rather than focusing on keeping everything under control (you know, it is difficult to balance such a wall of sound and even if Jeff is really good at that, the listener sometimes could find hard to follow what's going on), are able to find a balance thanks to a good mix of good drumbeat, many synth layers with good sounds and an interesting ambient/dub influence (see for example "Fornaicus", "Fists of love" and the following "An awakening"). There also examples of good powerful vocal tunes where the distortion grows little by little (see "Sub-nality") and there you have the chance to check the great Jeff's skills as sound builder. You'll appreciate this album with different listening sessions...

I was doubtful if reviewing this or not but the honesty of Andy Duncan convinced me to spend some words about his work. Active in the 80's with different monikers but taking mainly his musical activity as personal amusement, Andy did during the years about 20 releases. He describes himself as home brew industrialist and DISPERSAL PROCEDURES is a live recording (a mono crowd recording) of his participation at the 2008 Venn Festival in Bristol. The twelve tracks of the CD are a sort or reworked compilation of his past works and actually they sound as a mixture of Mark E. Smith (of The Fall) on acid while hitting on his guitar and noisy tape cut-ups. Some tracks sound interesting but the poor recording doesn't help me understanding Andy's industrial spoken word. If you are English, you like originality and you ain't afraid of sane craziness, write him a mail...

Self released under the Creative Commons license and distributed as a free download directly from their website, SCHIZOPHRENIA TEACH ME LOVE is the first official album of Schizophrenia. Formed in Tuscany in 2000 and with two demos released during the last eight years, the band with SCHIZOPHRENIA TEACH ME LOVE is giving for free a well produced work full of great sounds (here you find guitars mixed with industrial sounds and synths) and energy. Try to imagine a post metal record mixed with danceable electro industrial rhythms where Andy Thorne screams are well supported by razor like guitars, distortions and few synth lines. Songs like "Dry water" could find tons of fans into the WGT people, willing to find cool melodies into granitic sounds. The only weak point, in my opinion, is the vocal style which tend to sound the same for the whole CD length.

Distant cracklings, hisses, shattered concrete walls. Imagine to be underwater while a ship called America is sinking. Hoarfrost's GROUND ZERO tries to make you live the 9/11 experience as you were one of the people that was under the ruins of the two towers while waiting for an helping hand. The six tracks of this album sound simply as that and for a better experience you have to listen to this in total darkness. I'm not going to talk about the album's musicality as there isn't any and even if this could be filed under the dark ambient/industrial genre, it isn't because there's no research of melody (even if there's some on the closing track "Red alert") nor of rhythm. Into the CD data partition you can also find an mpg video file for the track "From here to ruins". No need to tell you that ruins (not the Ground Zero ones) are the only things that have been shot.

Originally released in 1996, KNAR has been the first Different State release. In balance between Sonic Youth and Godflesh sound, the nine tracks of the two album's sides (the first is titled EGO and the second BURDEN), show a good band who was son of those times. Distorted bass guitar, dissonant electric guitars build a good wall of sound but the band didn't focus their attention on power only, they alternate 4/4 powerful noise tracks with other particular ones (see the second song, "Silvery hebrew" where we have a jazzy structure painting a semi post punk slow ballad a la Birthday Party and "Kna?", an experimental soundtrack sounding track with looped sounds, metal percussions and mysterious atmosphere). The tracks have been remastered and on this edition we also have two bonus tunes: "Traktat 1" (an track based on acoustic guitar, strings and flute) and "Traktat 2" (a great dark industrial track with synthesizers, weird sounds and tons of tension). Really interesting...