I’ve grown to hate the term ‘industrial’. Being able to remember the heyday of real industrial when Throbbing Gristle, Chrome and (early) Cabaret Voltaire were the avante-garde, then the dirty mutant metal infected siblings of Ministry, Godflesh or Front Line Assembly stomped through, the current cookie-cutter sterile excuse for machine music bolted on to metal and in particular death metal is pathetic. I wonder if C.R.O.W.N. have similar feelings because I could find no mention of it in the PR, just talk of two men and a machine and electronics.
Actually this French sludge/doom/electronic duo bring to mind another name: EBM. Electronic body music. In particular Belgian stalwarts Front 242. If Front 242 had been formed by members of Neurosis and Isis with lead weights chained to the guitar strings that is.
Yeah. Different. Very.
And good.
Very.
A weird, buried in the mix intro gives way to an absolute avalanche of ponderous guitar and keyboard riffing, the minimalist drum machine keeping time as deep, intoned vocals creep out of the speakers full of dread. There’s that delicate, radiant guitar sound of Isis, the wash and hiss of keyboards and a slow, punishing atmosphere of hopelessness. The howled, harrowing vocals that rise as the intensity pounds into us are superb. Machine music in the midst of a slow metal maelstrom they call Abyss. Slow and as heavy as watching gravity crush a star out of existence. It pounds into the ritualistic Blood Runs and by this point the genre boundaries have been rent out of existence; a tinge of NIN binds to black metal and wraps itself in a death metal sludge. They have an approach to melody like Isis raising blisters, vocals like a demon bellowing into the face of the void, isolating and utterly compelling.
Empress_Hierophant eases back on the sonic assault with a spacious sound, electronically edged vocals and hypnotic delivery. Front 242 in their Up Evil period at sludge speeds, the demon in the machine.
The minimal patterns of the drum machine lend a sense of control and structure to the chaos that C.R.O.W.N. let loose around it without sterilising the whole. It is not pretending to be other than it is. They can slide through electronic soundscapes such as Telepath with as much ease as the navigate the violence and We Will Crush The Sky has roots deep in the warning political and future-shock firmament of 80s EBM just lashed to an almost Neurosis level of apocalyptic promise. Then again, Alpha_Omega goes initially for full tilt black metal before settling somewhere slow and dark. It really is a profound and mutant beast that C.R.O.W.N. have created here.
As a downside it is long, and I think some will always want to let go around track eight. But that and the curiously obvious Neurosis worship of parts of the otherwise slightly weak title track are really the only downsides here.
Welcome, my friends, welcome… to… the machine.
(8/10 Gizmo)
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