This compilation from Europe and the U.S. is a hardcore industrial dance lover's dream - harsh, repetitive, aggressive music which scrapes your brains raw as it kicks your ass. I suspect it's way too harsh for the folks who go to raves only to be seen in striped hats and baggy pants. It's highly hallucinatory, although the images the songs evoke are extremely dark, full of smoke, explosions, twisted metal and heavily armed soldiers hopped-up on amphetamines. Imagine your favorite industrial noise-collage group, then add insanely catchy basslines, hammering beats and abrupt tempo shifts; the result sounds as if Prodigy and Einsturzende Neubauten had collided in a horrible, bloody accident.
Try Cellblock X's "Sugar Robot;" it's the tribal dance music you hope is playing in the bunker as the air raid sirens signal the incoming North Korean warheads. Or Terror Times' "Something Like This"- so gratingly annoying it could be a psy-op weapon. And if you've never danced to a psy-op weapon in an abandoned warehouse at 4 am, you've missed a great chance for spiritual fulfillment in post-industrial America. But don't let the bleakness fool you; there's dark humor in these grooves, like the techno-mambo intro to Northern Lights' "On The Edge" or the sirens and chorus of "Amsterdam Is On Fire" by D & F: "We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn!"
This music is perfect soundtrack accompaniment for the futuristic techno-horror flicks I rent at Dave's Videodrome. It amazes me how folks who love harsh, annoying guitar punk and dark visions of the future get all superior when someone throws in an electronic beat and calls it "techno." For me, dancing to music this inhuman is a way to ritually reclaim a part of the foul-smelling, toxic, metallic world I was born into; instead of feeling powerless, afraid and alone, I grab the petroleum-fueled monster by the throat and shake it around for a while. It's the same desperate, angry, slightly insane feeling I get when I hear, say, Pipe. It feels great. (Todd Morman)