Front Line Assembly | Improvised. Electronic. Device.

Most Likely To: be the soundtrack of a collapsing new ministry building.

The early 1990s were lousy with industrial bands. You couldn’t swing a dead goth without hitting a bunch of pissed off faux-Teutons shrieking apocalyptic rants through vocal processors atop electronic beats and shredding guitars. The style was so ubiquitous that the first few Lollapalooza tours had to have a designated industrial slot, to scratch the itch of those kids in the alternative nation for whom even grunge wasn’t outlandishly glum enough for.

In these days of a vanished global economy, a tar pit between New Orleans and Cancun, and a sizable chunk of the populace seriously considering electing a moose-hunting MILF to run the whole shebang, it’s kind of hard to remember what exactly everyone was so pissed off about in the Lollapalooza age. But there was enough rage in the air to give industrial music a pretty decent run in the public consciousness until the end of the ‘90s, when the machine ran out of steam and was sold off for parts. The processed vocals, bad attitude, and metallic guitars ended up the property of the crybabies in the nu-metal movement while the electronic beats and synthesizers returned to their roots with the neo-new wave/synth-pop revival of the last decade.

Canada’s Front Line Assembly were big dogs in the bygone industrial era. Not as big as Nine Inch Nails or Ministry, to be sure, but if you consider the fact that most people never realized that Front Line Assembly wasn’t the same band as Front 242, they probably seemed twice as popular as they really were. And they had some heavy-duty bona fides in the fact that frontman and sole permanent member Bill Leeb was an alumnus of genre pioneers Skinny Puppy, while on-again/off-again (currently off) member Rhys Fulber had a name that really sounded like a name a guy in an industrial band should have.

Unlike most of their industrial brethren who pretty much shuttered the factories for the past decade, FLA have tried to stick it out, not that anyone has paid much attention. Leeb’s side-project Delirium, which paired up a variety of ethereal songbirds with electronic beats, has had a much higher profile thus far in the 21st century. But Leeb is back with a new FLA album, and who knows? Perhaps the world is fucked enough right at the moment that glumsters worldwide will take notice again.

If they do take a listen to Improvised. Electronic. Device., they’ll hear an album that’s not a whole different than any given industrial album from 1992. This isn’t a particularly bad thing, given the genre. Industrial has always been one of the more hidebound styles, with the only real variables being whether the guitars grind louder than the synths burble. Songs like “Angriff,” “Shifting Through the Lens,” and the Al Jourgensen featuring “Stupidity” don’t rewrite the rules of industrial music in any way, but they work just fine within the established boundaries. The tempos race, the synthesizers pulse like the veins of very angry Germans, the guitars snarl like hellhounds of the apocalypse, and the vocals sound like the voice of Satan filtered through an electric fan.

In a nutshell, if you’ve ever liked an industrial album, chances are good you’ll like this one okay. If you’ve never liked an industrial album, why have you bothered reading this in the first place? Nothing on this album is going to make you a fan if you never have been before, but its devotion to a genre whose time has come and gone is almost sweet.