In recent years, electronic music has become pervasive in the mainstream as well as on the fringes - both in the sense that digital programming and electronic sounds are being incorporated into compositions at an increased rate, and that in some cases, electronic entities themselves are writing the music (see the current controversy with AI artists breaking through the country music charts.) With that comes a sense that the music should be brighter, springier, more energetic, as electronics so often take us into higher registers and up-tempo beats.
Here’s where the analogy starts - there is a sense that electronic music is a late-era Gundam - agile, accurate, festooned in bright colors and blazing across the sky at a nigh-unbelieveable rate. Combichrist, by virtue of being an industrial band from back before the proliferation and ready access of electronica, is a lumbering OmniMech; a seventy-five ton Mad Cat (or Timber Wolf,) of teeth and forward-facing visceral power, painted in unforgiving gunmetal gray.
Ever since the band composed the soundtrack for the video game DmC: Devil May Cry, there’s been a theory that the band has slowly moved more toward metal and away from the straight industrial they cut their teeth on. The culmination of this was 2024’s excellent CMBCRST, which one writer on these pages named the Album of the Year.
The Venom In The Mouth of God, slams the gears into reverse, and takes the band back to thundering basics. It is not until halfway into the album with “Rise” that the band even hints at the metal that forged so much of the three albums before (we remain convinced that it was coded into the Geneva Convention and Vatican II that every industrial band has to write a song called “Rise” or “Risen” or “Rise Up” or some such.)
While those metal hammers get dropped now and again, that’s not really what The Venom… is about. The album wants to be sparse and haunting and deadly, a brooding monster with a fission core that threatens with every ponderous stride and shadow of presence. While the songs at the outset prove the attempt, it’s in the back half where the record really flashes its jagged fangs.
No song on the album more proves Combichrist’s (and ideaman Andy LaPlegua’s) skill at composing in this vein than the questionably mature “S.T.F.U.” (not just a John Cena maneuver anymore!) This is one of those rare songs that shouldn’t work, but does - it is, ironically, kind of a strange cousin of Fear Factory’s ill-conceived “Back The Fuck Up” from 2001, a stream-of-consciousness quasi-rap that has no business being as well assembled or catchy as it is.
It sets the stage for the rest of the album, where, as odd as this sounds, Combichrist composes a series of beat poems on steroids, with LaPlegua as the cybernetic Allen Ginsberg. Again, should this work? Maybe not, but listen to the venomous undercurrent of “The Way We Want To Be Seen,” and try to find a crack in the armor. LaPlegua has always had this in him; the ability to set introspective missives on personal anguish and impermanence to a cinematic beat (thinking of “Bottle of Pain” from One Fire,) but he really takes the chains off for this album and leans into the style.
What the listener takes away from The Venom In The Mouth Of God, will really come down to what side of Combichrist is preferred. Those who exclusively believe the band’s best material has been in the their last three albums may well find this a harder journey, where those who lament the band ever straying from their roots will rejoice. Either way, the fact remains that the album’s final eight songs will take the listener on a journey of steel and fire and discontent, with nary a beam saber in sight.
No comments:
Post a Comment