Album Review: Combichrist - "CMBCRST"

One can only speculate at the difficulties of being a band that folds so many sounds into a single whole, and shoulders the boulder of fan expectation that is made more cumbersome by the multiple ridges and sharp points of that self-same rock.  

There stands Combrichrist, an Atlas-ian figure in the industrial scene, who for much of the last decade and a half, have made moves toward accessibility in their music; an ideological shift away from the pure density of industrial that has drawn the expected amount of vacuous ire from the unwashed masses, usually couched in the stigmatic phrase “sold out.”

(Parenthetically, to accuse Combichrist of catering toward a popular audience is outrageously absurd – play their previous album “One Fire,” for your high school guidance counselor and see how it resonates.)

Even the most ardent of industrial purists, upon hearing Combichrist’s newest concoction, “CMBCRST,” should have no choice but to grudgingly admit that the entire paradigm shift they so reviled without cause may have been a learning experience.  Without those steps, it is nigh impossible to consider that “CMBCRST” would exist in the same form, as this new, burning furnace of metal bends the iron of the band back toward their roots, without abandoning all the recent gains.

It feels shallow to simply compare Combichrist at this stage in their careers to tentpole names from the genre, but this record is truly Andy LaPlegua and company becoming the standard bearer for industrial by combining all the successful elements of their contemporaries, while imprinting their own idiomatic maker’s mark on the style.  “CMBCRST” is a synthesis of all things KMFDM, Ministry, PAIN, Fear Factory, Nine Inch Nails and yes, Combichrist.

One need not get father than the album’s second cut, “D For Demonic,” to be reminded of the best ideas that “Nihil”-era KMFDM ever had, complete with, to steal that band’s phrase, the ‘ultra-heavy beat.’  The guitar is insistent and unyielding, the beat compelling and driving, accented with the kind of end licks, sampling and distortion that one would expect from Ministry.  Through it all, LaPlegua’s characteristic growl moves the narrative and ties the song firmly to the bedrock of the band playing it, thus creating a separation from those other bands while simultaneously alloying them.  

There’s more good stuff to come, but right after “D For Demonic” is where this record faces its only complication – there’s a stretch of about six straight forgettable tunes right in the middle of the record.  The staccato digital piercing of “Only Death is Immortal” is an interesting concept, but fades into a generic chorus.  “Northern Path” is a curious interplay of brooding melodrama and metal hammering, but “Bottle of Pain” from the previous album did the same thing better.  And PAIN fans will note that the opening riff of “Through the Ravens Eyes” sounds an awful lot like the opening section of that band’s single “Call Me.” (Sidebar: PAIN has also released an album recently, and we’ll hopefully discuss that next week.)

And then, “Not My Enemy,” and everything that happens from this point forward on “CMBCRST” is, for lack of a more eloquent descriptor, awesome.  Starting with “Not My Enemy,” the vocal cadence and phrasing of the building wave is catchy and uniquely constructed, never mind that the backbone of this song is a pure industrial beat of the highest order.  It’s quite a feat to combine a true and authentic metal breakdown with a hammering digital beat, what sounds like a drunken Speak & Spell, and also find time by merely saying “all eyes on me” to invoke fine memories of Tupac, but here we are!  There’s a lot of great stuff on “CMBCRST,” but this song is the crown jewel.

The album’s other single “Planet Doom” is novel for all the inspiration it takes from Italian horror soundtracks, combining that aesthetic with a gang chorus, a heavy-handed cymbal beat and a tempo that never allows the track to linger.  The album closes with the punchy and anthemic “Violence Solves Everything” a fitting coda to an album that tries to prove that point for almost an hour.

“One Fire” was a great album, a metal coming-of-age for an industrial band that was completing an evolutionary arc.  “CMBCRST” takes everything learned from that record, and indeed all the steps it took to get there, and synthesizes them into this new whole, using both the novel and familiar to create a record that, if perhaps a few cuts too long, still sets a high bar for any artist who aims to make a statement in the genre.  It is a worthy achievement.