round about the mid 90s there was a short lived period of uk guitar based music when pop bands absorbed sonic tropes from the industrial metal scene. the angry vocals, and overall intensity was lowered to a level that some of the music even made it onto the mainstream airwaves.
i am talking about the time when bands like emf, pop will eat itself, curve, jesus jones, whale, and even fraggle pop entities such as neds atomic dustbin, added clipped processed guitars, samples, and machine based drum loops to their hopeful chart entries, often drafting in remix and/or production duties from foetus, on-u sound, and even the young gods.
needless to say i loved it all.
then in 2006 i picked up on a project that totally revived my love for the industrial vs pop thing : flykiller.
comprising of ex-free association studio guru, stephen hilton, and polish pop legend, pati yang, they released a wonderful conceptual art-electro-industrial album, experiments in violet light, that pulled me out of my electronica shell and made me fall for them hard.
and the reason i mention all this ?
well, after many many spins, the excellent track beautiful scum on this debut album by primitive ignorant, the penny eventually dropped that its a direct descendant to that long forgotten band.
once i made that connection (it had been bugging me), the rest of the albums brilliance slipped into place.
primitive ignorant is the new sonic vehicle of sym gharial. sym grew up in london loving punked up rock and roll, before heading to brighton and becoming part of the fantastic gothed up psychobilly freakoids, 80s matchbox b-line disaster, and if you have never heard of them, then i urge you to go to youtube/spotify and dive in.
this time around though, sym provides all of the machine loops, samples, bass noise, (just listen to the fantastic guttural groove of ‘fluorescent ecstasy‘!), and beats.
to provide the vocal pop extras, he has dragged in all manner of friends, including leonore wheatley (from the international teachers of pop), le junk, amongst others.
the sound throughout is pure industrial pop with big fat basslines and hooks that are plentiful and very radio friendly if given the chance, and as if to prove the point i made earlier, i genuinely had to make sure that adrian ‘on-u sound’ sherwood was not buried in the credits as worship art has a beat that could have easily been done by tackhead/keith leblanc et al.
yes, it really is that good.
then to perfectly finish things off on the albums title track, fellow londoner, mick jones (from big audio dynamite), supplies a very effective spooked out monologue about the capital city against an atmospheric backdrop of echoed dub bass, a looped saxophone sample and environmental ambience.
the end result is one my favourite albums of the year.
highly recommended.
more detail : here