Flesh Field – “Strain”

Flesh Field

Category: Industrial
Album: Strain

Industrial music used to be cool. There was a day when it was an edgy reflection of the dark parts of our society, harsh, unforgiving, defiant, rebellious. It got you excited. It raised your blood pressure. It made you want to kick the shit out of someone. It was music that you could just rock the fuck out to. Even the worst industrial bands still made an emotional connection, tried to get the blood pumping, the mind involved, and an emotional response (usually anger) from the listener.

Today our music is bland pastiche of electronic noise and beats mixed with the trappings of a variety of synthpop or repetitive dance beats run through severe distortion and covered in grainy samples. Gone are the days that music made you feel something, something more than a lukewarm happiness or a general sense of enjoyment. Today’s industrial has left behind the tradition of being the rebellious sister genre of punk and has instead become the sister genre of electroclash, an 80’s throwback genre more interested in dance beats and techno affectations than the roots of what made the music cool.

But some artists try defiantly to stay cool, to give the listener something more than the same clichés and melodramatic pop songs. They are fewer and more far between than ever. And they are considered dinosaurs of the 90’s, music that no one in our community wants. Industrial-rock is for kids and losers and metalheads.

But Flesh Field is bringing it back in a day and age when there is hardly youth in the scene anymore. Their peers are bands that have existed for 10 years or more and they easily stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them while all the other groups from this era churn out a thin gruel of industrial-rock mainly consisting of nu-metal with a sequencer backdrop.

Flesh Field’s Strain brings a cyberpunk sheen back to the genre. Some of the songwriting is not perfect. The male vocals are mixed fairly low and are a bit too deep into the mix for my liking. But all the right things about Strain that work more than make up for the few things that don’t.

This album sees the addition of a female vocalist to the group, something that I usually prefer to avoid. I’ve never liked female vocalists, but Wendy Yanko handles her vocal duties with a gentle touch, keeping it well within the bounds of becoming a metal vocalist or an ethereal goth crooner. Wendy and Ian Ross craft fantastic songs that may not be the catchiest that I’ve ever heard, but deliver with more ingenuity than I’ve seen in years.

Flesh Field favors orchestral samples mixed in with their unabashed electro-rock. I swear that one of the tracks features bits swiped directly from the score of the movie Titus. The mix of styles is very good and the touches of EBM, powernoise, and classical all blend into the rock in a way that suits the listener best.

Don’t be fooled by Metropolis’ name on this CD. This is not an EBM album, no matter what you might be told. The songs are all written like rock anthems, the drums are very organic and aren’t crippled by the hindrance of dance programming, and the guitar stays in the middle region between background instrument and overuse, exactly where it should be. The band finds more of a contemporary in Celldweller, whose music I believe it most closely mimics, than in any of the roster of Metropolis.

If one is inclined to look back fondly on the bygone days of industrial-rock bringing real feelings, passion, and drive to music, then this a CD that warrants your attention, hopefully the first in a new breed of musicians and albums that will bring the coolness back to industrial. If that’s not what you’re looking for, well, I don’t think that there’s any hope left for you.

 

from ReGen Magazine (~1/2005)