The Insult that Made a Man Out of Mac –
II
Varsto72 records /Riemu
By Jose Fritz Before this, I had wandered off in industrial-rock
hopelessness… I hadn’t heard an industrial record that
I cared about in years. I’d actually been revisiting the peak
years around 1992. It was a good era. Outburn magazine was in its
heyday. Nine Inch Nails had just released Broken. Skinny Puppy had
put out Last Rights. Sister Machine Gun was about to put out its
first LP. Lords of Acid got their naked-she-devils album art censored.
Slipdisc records were about to open their doors. Things were good.
By 2002, a mere 10 years later Nine Inch Nails sucks like an ugly
pederast. Skinny Puppy was long gone. Goth Kids started listening
to Korn and stopped bathing. Slipdisc had closed up. Praga Kahn
put out a couple LPs of gay 80’s synth-pop. In a word: MDFMK…
The Insult… just about tore my head clean off when I heard
it. The singer is a screaming maniac. They have that rock structure
that early industrial had. They owe much more of their sound to
bands like Killing Joke, November 17, and Clay People; they use
real instruments, but with layers of loops, effects, distortion,
to make it industrial. They completely avoided that dead-end limp
subgenre of industrial dance.
They seem to have absorbed some of the lessons from 2nd Gen, and
the other later noise aficionados. A certain amount of dissonance
and abrasive noise is good. It lends texture to the rhythm. It takes
the elements of the beat from behind the rhythm and moves them individually
to the forefront where they may more easily hit listeners about
the face and shoulders to leave the bruises that make the songs
memorable.
The Insult… isn’t a rehash of everything else. There
is a lineage in industrial music beginning shortly after Einstürzende
Neubauten and leading through the greatest bands of the era. The
Insult could be the genres last great flash of brilliance.
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