The Bell
Great Heat
Badman Recording Co.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Link: http://www.thebell.se

Are you ready to be dominated by a venomous sound? Blending coldwave with a hyperactive industrial slant to Britpop lust to post-punk glimmer in their eyes, The Bell pass by French New Wave and cold Deutsche Industrialism to be found in Sweden’s post-modern curvature.

“Holiday” may be hyperactive in their gyration and poise, “23 Seconds” is more scenester parklife contemplation that moves as slow as a Sunday afternoon. Their ethereal pop is as dreamy as it comes.

With the re-popularization of OMD and remnants of Pet Shop Boys still ringing in our ears, “I Can’t Change” is perfect for the New New Romantic in you. And if you are deaf after turning up “Tell Us You’re Sorry,” don’t say we did not warn you. It’s as infectious as any early Depeche Mode song.

“Dope Makes You” seems like an oddball in the amalgamation of this album not for the female guest vocals that is a lovely addition to the style but for the idea that this song is so comfortably indie. For Great Heat it’s like someone in a foreign country screaming forth with blatant tourist fashion. It’s uncomfortable, especially when we have been conditioned by dark, brooding synth pop.

But the band returns to form for the final two songs, songs that will make you swoon in howling pleasure.

Click on the label to play the song.

Chicago’s White Car still have the taste in their mouths and nostalgia in their eyes that point directly to the Wax Trax! scene. Their coldwave antics will make you think you have seen a ghost, and like UK’s Editors, the voice’s dominating low-end aesthetics etches this band out in stone.

Their EP No Better will be released August 31st on Hippos In Tanks via digital and vinyl only.

Link: http://white-car.net/

Radio Radio is normally undeniably a “Bring Your Favorite Black Shirt” type of establishment. Slick Idiot and their brand of electronic rock debauchery brought a different type of clientele and their prominent spectrums of independent fashion sense with them on Friday’s musky evening. Ranging from; Guy in studded leather jacket with insanely tall Mohawk, three people who desperately wished to be Trent Reznor in “Closer” with bug eye goggles on in an already dark bar, man in a nice button down shirt with camouflage shorts (Ok, not overly weird but just…awkward), and an overweight heavily bearded man who thought it was a good idea to wear a wrinkly skirt, wobbly tunic and a sling back purse pressing between man cleavage.

I had to recheck the sign on the door and even checked the status online of start time. Doors open at 8 PM, show starts at 9 PM but here I am at 10:30 PM wondering what the hell is going on. We had a DJ keeping us in the head bobbing mood with remixed renditions of Rammstein, Front Line Assembly, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, VNV Nation, etc. Even by 10 PM, the freaky faithful were looking around annoyed. Finally, at 10:40 PM, Slick Idiot approaches the stage. Nobody ran to the front of the stage in a hurry because even they thought, “Seriously? This is finally happening!?”

I was a huge fan of vocalist En Esch and guitarist Günter Schulz’ (founding members of Slick Idiot) former industrial band KMFDM as a teenager. I only heard Slick Idiot’s first album DickNity so this concept was far from new to me. Over the years, after discovering new influences and bands, I forgot about my love affair for these bands and industrial music.

I couldn’t help but relive that teenage excitement after seeing my former idols take the stage. Singer En Esch introduced the band to Radio Radio with his deep German accent. Slick Idiot wastes no more time and barrages in the nimble electronic beats of “Hallelujah” (Devil’s Got a Hold of Me) and followed just as quickly into the band’s treble filled title track “Idiot.” En Esch surprisingly sounds exactly like he did in KMFDM with his brute decipherable growls. Günter Schulz’ style is still just as solid. Shultz has always been power riff happy but was never overly complicated; simple yet effective. Electronic mischief is ignored on “I.I.W.I.I.” (It Is What It Is), a song off the new album Sucksess, to achieve a monster sound with Shultz taking center stage in his octave intertwining charge throughout the song. The crowd was surprisingly tame. Not like I expected fist hurling mosh pits from the unique bunch, but I was just surprised they were content with simply head banging.

The translucent techno rock vibe was fleetly ignored once special guest singer Mona Mur was introduced. I didn’t know who she was at the time and her association with Slick Idiot. After some research, Mur and En Esch have a side project together, resulting in the cooperative album 120 Tage: The Fine Art of Beauty and Violence. The name of the album is fitting, especially to the methodical cabaret madness of “Visions & Lies.” Mona Mur had a down beaten afflicted voice that gave a gloomy gloss to their music. As it was different, I wasn’t confident it was appreciated as it was an adjacent and sudden turn from Slick Idiot in mood and spirit.

“Xcess” reclaimed the audience from the ashes with its frantic beats and jumpy ambience and “I Feel Fine” provided an energetic assist. The crowd took a collective internal grown when Mona Mur hopped back on stage. En Esch jumped on dueling guitar with Shultz on the side project’s calculatingly serious “The Thin Red Line.” Mur and En Esch also performed “Candycane” which equally contributed to the mood suicide. Even Günter looked bored of the languish pace, as this is contradicting of him normally blazingly supplying note after note. As each song complimented Mona’s voice, I don’t think it complimented Slick Idiot and its fans.

Everyone looked at each other in amazement when they heard the kinetic chime introduction of KMFDM’s “Leid and Elend” off the 1997 album Symbols. If that wasn’t enough, they quickly advanced to another KMFDM retro hit “A Drug Against War.” Finally, Günter and En Esch embrace their past and give the crowd what they secretly wanted. As there looks to never be an original member KMFDM reunion, this is as close as it will get. Everyone was pumped, singing along to the songs and ricocheting off each other in elation. It didn’t faze anyone when they went back to the Slick Idiot “Make Me Believe” as it was bouncy thrash that is the transcendent core of these bands. Slick Idiot did a mock disappearance to garner approval from the fans for the expected encore. They did not disappoint with the mammoth KMFDM “Godlike” that sent everyone in a jubilated frenzy.

It was either an enormous hit or a depressingly miss set from Slick Idiot. When they stuck with their original and cover material, En Esch, Shultz and company were unstoppable. It really brought me back to another time, a time I missed more than I could have ever imagined. The show at Radio Radio was a definite success considering the circumstances. I’m listening to Slick Idiot’s new album Sucksess as I wrote this. Isn’t that proof enough?

Links:

65daysofstatic homepage: http://www.65daysofstatic.com/
Monotreme Records: http://www.monotremerecords.com/

In a series of performances supporting a virtually unknown band from England called The Cure (has anyone ever  heard of them?), 65daysoftatic recorded a number of tracks that appear on Escape from New York, from the Madison Square Gardens and Radio City Music Hall gigs.

65dos is an instrumental, electronic, alternative math post-rock band hailing from England. Falling somewhere in intensity between Aphex Twin and The Prodigy, the band uses heavy doses of vocal and noise sampling, distorted guitars, synthesizers and 808 drums (techno fans will understand that reference) to pack its release full of sound. Powerful, in-your-face, and rather well-crafted, 65dos apparently plays out with intensity not often seen in this genre.

One track that really sticks in my head is “Retreat! Retreat!” The equivalent of the chorus to this song is a great repeating melody that sounds like it is the music from some of the great melodic post-hardcore bands. The notable exception, of course, would be the lack of vocals and presence of electronic samples.

So many electronic bands have so much in common, and fans just accept this fact. This is fine, except that if one has a few releases in the genre, one really needn’t buy more than that; they’ve heard it all. 65daysofstatic is a rare exception to this group. The genre also doesn’t tend to lend itself well to live performances, but this release is a powerful testament to what can be done.

Other tracks to check out would be “Drove Through Ghosts to Get Here” (one of the best song titles I’ve ever heard), “No Use Crying Over a Little Techno,” and “Fix the Sky a Little.”

Origin: Geneva, Switzerland
Style: Industrial

1995 was a strange year for industrial music. It soaked up the albums that exploded the year earlier, and gave other bands time to spend in the studio. It was a period still caught in transition while the pioneers were weeding themselves out. Nine Inch Nails was still riding the high horse from The Downward Spiral, and industrial was barking up the heavy metal tree with more ferocious guitar-driven songs thanks to KMFDM and Ministry beginning the trend in the early ‘90s. This was the new Industrial.

On the other end of the electronic spectrum, dance bands like Orbital were reaping the benefits from the popular release Snivilisation, and a band that helped pave the path for bands like Meat Beat Manifesto and The Prodigy to push out into the forefront. This was the beginning of the new era of electronic music. It also saw influential industrialists like Killing Joke and Front 242 struggle to stay on top.

But for The Young Gods, despite several monumental albums, they never reached their apex of fame like they should have, a shame at the time but a blessing in disguise as the band always have created their own destiny and adapted throughout the years. For a group of Swiss the Industrial aspect of the band has always been at geographical odds, siding more with the French than the German, the English, or the American style. Their ideology is versatile, as Stephane Herve for dsp2000 makes it sound like poetry, “a magical universe of sound, landscapes and emotions attracting a huge and eclectic following, still surprised by the many different aspects of their music.” (http://www.arobance.com/younggods3.html)

And for Only Heaven, they were not just keeping up with the times but surpassing them with their metallic palette of guitar sampling and thunderous tribal drum pounding, almost to an explosive effect because but amazingly turning the chaos into an elegant symphonic of otherworldly music. Their rhythmic approach follows the lead of San Francisco’s Grotus and their raucous physical tribalism of Brown, but goes far beyond the machinist drum epilepsy of Godflesh’ Streetcleaner and Pure.

If I needed a soundtrack to the universe, this is it. To me, this is what the cosmos sounds like. I can close my eyes and the swirling, pounding, vibrating electronic sounds, hums, and pure power go beyond any world I can pinpoint on a copy of National Geographic.

The charm of Only Heaven lies in the continuation of experimentalism and ambient curiosity that is as flawless as the breath you are taking. There isn’t an immediate harshness to their heavy side or an unbecoming dullness to their wave of meandering sounds. If you paid close attention, you caught an example of it on “September Song” and their homage album to Kurt Weill.

For lead vocalist Franz Treichler, Only Heaven was not just a follow-up from TV Sky, but an re-examination that goes back to their first album. “It’s also a return to the experimentalism of the first L.P.,” he said (http://www.younggods.com/archives/younggods99/story.htm). Maybe so, but this stuff is light years beyond the rough cuts on their self-titled album, and even more atmospheric and progressive than on TV Sky.

This is apparent with the epic song “Moon Revolutions,” a sixteen-and-a half minute song that takes the essence of TV Sky’s ending opus “Summer Eyes,” but pushes the sonic landscape into harsher rock aesthetics and expansive ambient flowing electronic samples swirling around.

If TV Sky was the outwardly accessible rock album, then Only Heaven is the artistic plunge into the deep into the ethos of organic Industrialism. From the guitar crunch powertrip of “Strangel” to the soft-spoken haze of “Dreamhouse” the band leaves it up to you to create the reality. The only song that is certain is the finale, “Child In A Tree,” a song Treichler wrote based on the true story of a man who died from an overdose while hiding in a tree from the Zurich police.

Cross-Reference: Killing Joke, Einsturzende Neubeuten, Tangerine Dream.