"Industrial music is no more than than hard chart techno", states the booklet of the first releases by Armalyte Industries. And hence, trying to present an alternative to this evolution, this new english label has decided to hit hard for its first release, with 16 tracks of violent, guitarized, industrial rock. All you fans of technoid industrial, breakbeats and glitchy things, beware, this is coming directly from the forges that already made Ministry, KMFDM, Chemlab, some Nine Inch Nails, and the likes. Each track follow each other, delivering guitars riffs after guitars riffs, with very fast paced rhythms, angry distorted vocals and crunchy beats.

It all goes from the very rocky pieces (K-Nitrate) to the more gothic ones (Chaos Engine), and explores a wide range of variations around industrial rock as you can hear it in goth clubs around the world. Even though some tracks sounded a bit too plain to my ears, my favorites on this compilation turned out to be, among others, the bands I was expecting the best material to come from. First, the Pain Machinery, whose demo and track on "Krach Test" were very good, offer the least guitar-ized and noisiest track on the sampler, with a very good use of samples. Then, Cubanate, by far the biggest act on this bill, appear with a rather good extract from their next album. This track "Razor Edge", starts rather weakly, but comes back to the sheer energy of the typical Cubanate material in its second half. Apart from these two very good contributions, I was also well impressed by Sulpher and Bloodthirsty Massacre (even though this is really anm horrible bandname), but the end of the compilatiom made me want to press the stop button several times, with a really bad goth track by Chaos Engine and another by Caffeine Kill (sorry, I am not sold to acid-batcave, or whatever this is). All in all, this compilation has a really nice energy and pushes a style that has been a bit in the shadow recently. However, one has to admit that several songs are really not that good, with some band that should work a bit more on an original sound. People into industrial rock should very probably check this sampler out, as well as fans of the kind of sounds you can hear in english clubs. I personnally think I will listen to this disc mostly for the couple of excellent tracks it features (and it will help me wait for the for the coming Pain Machinery and Cubanate albums).

Nicolas, June 11th, 2001

Review from Recycle your ear

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