1. My Kingdom by The Future Sound of London, from the album Dead Cities [Genre: Trip-Hop] Video Link

2. Inside of You, In Spite of You by Thoushaltnot, from the album The White Beyond [Genre: Synthpop/Electro-goth] Video Link

3. Night Riders by Stromkern, from the album Armageddon [Genre: Industrial Hip-Hop] Video Link

4. God is God by Juno Reactor, from the album Bible of Dreams [Genre: Goa Trance] Video Link

5. Pavanne for an Angel by Cast in Bronze, from the album Best Day Ever [Genre: New Age] Video Link

6. Epitaph by Front Line Assembly, from the album Epitaph [Genre: Industrial] Video Link

7. Love Never Dies by Saviour Machine, from the album Saviour Machine II [Genre: Gothic/Progressive Metal] Video Link

As just a note before I start this review, I will be periodically be referring to music theory terms.  When I do this, I will put footnotes at the bottom of the review to explain somewhat of what these terms mean.

MewithoutYou could be best classified as an indie or alternative Christian band.  As a person who had been generally been accustomed to more melodic music, I had at first discarded this CD, which features a lead vocalist who speaks (or shouts) in a more rhythmic and poetic fashion.  However, anyone who is a fan of mewithoutYou should know that their music is certainly of an entirely different style.  Their harmonic rhythm (1) is generally very slow, stationing on the tonic (2), dominant (3), or dominant prep (4).  Their lyrics are complex, and of beautiful poetic structure.  Naturally, the poetic nature of the vocalist’s speech conveys this quality.

(stay tuned for more to come, and an actual review/overview of the tracks)

Index:

(1) Harmonic Rhythm – When referring to specific chord structures like the dominant, tonic, and dominant prep, and the rhythm of the progression of these chords.

(2) Tonic – The chord built on the first note of a scale/key (and similiar sounding chords, which are generally referred to as the sub-tonics).  This is generally the most stable sounding chord, and is very frequently used to start and end a piece and/or musical phrase.

(3) Dominant – The chord built on the fifth note of a scale/key (and similar sounding chords, which are generally referred to as the sub-dominants).  The dominant generally falls just before resolving once more to a tonic, and is almost always a major chord, even if it isn’t in the key signature.

(4) Dominant prep – The chord built on the fourth note of a scale/key (and similar sounding chords).  The dominant prep usually is used as it sounds: as a prep for the dominant chord.  Hence, the most basic structure of a music phrase is generally Tonic -> Dominant Prep -> Dominant -> Tonic.

I am a seventeen year old about to embark on my senior year of high school. I met Ghost online almost a year ago, and it has been a profitable friendship for both of us. His wisdom and biblical knowledge have helped me on my pilgrimage of faith, and he’s also introduced me to some music I never thought I’d like.

Since this blog is primarily for music reviews, I will be posting a few. A warning, though: my musical tastes differ from Ghost’s sometimes, so don’t expect too much industrial from me.

I enjoy a variety of music. Christian industrial (Regenerator, ThouShaltNot), classic rock (Beatles), reggae (Matisyahu), and jazz (Norah Jones, Yoko Kanno’s Bebop work) to name a few. Of course, I enjoy classical as well (Bach’s organ works, Mozart’s Requiem and Yo-Yo Ma’s renditions of some things too). That’s a good sampling of what’s in my library, I think.
Thanks again, Ghost, and I hope this will be enjoyable for the both of us.

The sight is a barren junkyard filled to the top with the ruins of old factory equipment – testaments to collapse from the consequences of social decadence. Worst of all in this scrap heap, the giant and hence symbolically collective human heart has been turned into metal, been scrapped to the maximum degree possible, and discarded. This industrial album by Front Line Assembly both aesthetically and stylistically pays tribute to The Future Sound of London’s post-collapse cyberpunk themed albums Dead Cities and My Kingdom. The result is a truly masterful industrial album which I have enjoyed greatly, and which combines very well with the aforementioned FSOL albums.

1. Haloed

In the original My Kingdom by The Future Sound of London, the track made the interesting juxtaposition of traditional Japanese and Aboriginal instruments alongside its atmosphere of longing desolation. One listener on Amazon a long time ago speculated that this may drive the implicit theme that after some major disaster (like that ever popular Neo-Tokyo in cyberpunk media) you will see Japanese colonies in the outback of Australia. The beats start out with an interesting mixture of a traditional flavor to them while being strongly metallic and machine-sounding. Meanwhile, an audio sampled didgeridoo is repeated impossibly quickly for a somewhat mentally disturbing effect (much like the soundtrack to the cyberpunk anime Akira. From here on out the beats, have a crunchy mechanistic feel to them much like the slowed-down refrains of Drum ‘N’ Bass music (I say refrains as Front Line Assembly doesn’t do heart-attack paced breakbeats), which in this song sound a lot like an irrititable romp through the park in rivethead boots stepping on every pinecone in sight. The synthesizers are definately bass level, and for this song make quick sprints that are just about as crunchy as the beat. The vocals are a mildly vocoded hiss which refuses to scream but makes its underlying hostility and pain known. The lyrics describe feelings of intense alienation from the world and also from the evil in the self to the point of being “out cast from living”. No matter what lies and scorn society tries to heap upon our lone wolf dissident to bring him into a complacent conformity, he takes a bittersweet comfort in his own authenticity in the phase of phonies. He is not without hope however, interestingly the song ends with lyrics of apocalyptic salvation that “A savior is there – the end is near”.

It is my own interpretation of Front Line Assembly’s lyrics altogether is that they themselves believe in God, possibly the Christian God (but no, don’t even think for a second they should be classified with “Christian music”. Admittedly however, some albums show evidence that they haven’t quite pieced together Yeshua Christ’s message of loving your enemy and going the second mile. This is evidenced in the occasional fantasizing of eye-for-an-eye vengeance upon the guilty powerful. Has the leader of the KKK been responsible for murdering innocent civilians? Well, take him out and lynch him. Did the arms dealer engage in amoral and apathetic selling of weapons to both sides of an armed conflict without caring what casualties, particularly civilian “collateral damage” casualties died in the process? Well then, take a shotgun and shoot him in the chest. Like a lot of violence, this sounds really great and just on paper. Unfortunately, history, particularly the history of the French Revolution and the Jacobins under Robespierre shows the dark underside of this conception. For though Robespierre was an authentic man who genuinely wanted justice for France which he carried out in what was supposed to be retributive violence upon the terribly exploitative upper classes of France, in practice there was an epidemic of people falsely informing against their neighbors for selfish gain and/or personal vengeance for much lesser transgressions. In this we realize that as always, no matter how good violent solutions look on paper, only God can carry them out with the precision to spare the innocent. If Front Line Assembly or any major fans read this, I hope to God they consider this. If anybody wants real revolution that refuses to dehumanize like evil men dehumanize, that refuses to repay evil for evil in order to replace oppression with oppression, go read Yeshua in the Gospels and Leo Tolstoy’s (Christian anarchist) The Kingdom of God is Within You – for real revolution in politics begins with revolution of the soul. I apologize for my long rantings, but its a lot better that I speak up on this stuff now while I have the chance – its a lot better than innocent family men and women getting killed for no reason, which is the sort of thing Front Line Assembly was always against. After all, even Emma Goldman, the famous anarchist, lost her belief in violence as a viable solution when she saw the supposedly pro-worker Red Armies massacring a worker’s strike. I certainly wish the anarchists of Spain would have taken in Goldman’s newfound revelation when they were leading a settling disputes with their pistols. After all, anarchists settle disputes with their pistols, bombs, and terrorism while governments settle disputes with their machine guns, bombs, and terrorism. Whatever the case is though, these things are not terribly prevalent in this album.

2. Dead Planet

This round pays tribute to Dead Cities from Dead Cities similarly painting the mental landscape of a seriously dysfunctional landscape after collapse. The song begins with a few ominous bells at the edge of hearing with spinning machinery grinding its way, while an incredibly eerie creeping mechanical noise (I can only think of The Red Weed from Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of the Worlds as a comparison) hums and whines. The beats assume a frantic but stable pace like frantically running, while the synthesizer takes on a kind of bouncy sound almost like laser beams, among other things. The vocal is a whisper varying in degrees of loudness and also varying degrees of being vocoded. The lyrics concern the eerie and sleepless feeling of life in a spiritually dead and decadent city after the collapse, which has made the planet “a living hell” through man’s own folly.

As C.S. Lewis says of Gehenna (as our Lord called it) “If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvinirs of Hell…. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell….” (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce p. VIII-IX) A lot of Christians these days, as in the past, seem to think of the real hell as some kind of fiery-oven-torture-chamber based upon a hyper-literalistic reading of Biblical texts dealing with Gehenna which do not interact with the Biblical texts in their historical and symbolic contexts (i.e. Isaiah 66 and Daniel 12 in particular). However, more even-handed exegetes (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, N.T. Wright, Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship, Ben Witherington, Revelation: The New Cambridge Commentary, etc.) have realized that hell in hell is very much like what Industrial musicians think of when they sing of “hell on earth”. When we choose to tarnish the image of God within us by selfishly choosing to use the creative aspect of that image to selfishly dehumanize others (and hence, also ourselves), we make little pieces on Gehenna on earth which carry the potential to violently blossom both on earth and in Gehenna. This is the sort of thing that cruises in my head when I listen to a song like this anyway, as a grim reminder of the terror that I and everyone around me can become if they refuse to fight the dehumanization within.

3. Backlash

Here we have a strongly agressive piece. The beats move like a crusher-factory pressing everything into its mold harshly, while the synthesizers have a definite factory feel to them. The vocal carries a tone of tenacity and defiance, and likewise the lyrics bespeak the willingness to endure any level of pain to conform with the evil snares laid by society, which bring him to anger.

4. Epitaph

This round Front Line Assembly continues the factory themes present in the last piece and develops them further. The beats have a mixture of mechanism and calculated hesitation much like carefully choosing one’s steps, while the synthesizers have a snarling flow that feels a lot like infiltrating a factory of something like that. The vocals consist of a vocoded snarl that does not mask its frustration.

Because there turns out to have been a video made of this track which may be seen at Youtube, I can examine the lyrics alongside the visual context of the video. First and foremose, the video strarts with giant towers of arrogance (I’m drawing my symbolism here from Isaiah 2, if you have ears than hear) rendered in the style of Blade Runner’s opening scene. The scene is placed in Shinjuku, the buzzing business district of Tokyo which pulsates with neon at every turn, and looks the most like Blade Runner’s Chicago. Even among the Japanese, Shinjuku has become a symbol of the runaway decadence and both amoral and immoral overconsumption (see for example, Karas or Battle Royale II). In this respect we start with a prostitute who is needlessly delivered a sound beating leaving her with a black eye. Similarly, the lyrics speak of “the filth, the greed, immoral needs – the shameless urge or consumption.” It appears that Front Line Assembly rightly agrees with Charles Dickens that upsurging prostitution (and most likely by extension pornography and other forms of sexual dehumanization) has its roots in the industrial revolution, wherin man is content to treat his fellow man or woman as a disposable consumer good rather than as a man, who is always an end-in-themselves. Hence, the beatings challenge the viewer to come to grips with the costs of treating their fellow man as a consumer good, further expressed in the rendered scene where the woman begins to grow metallic objects upon her face, representative of the dehumanization by becoming more machine than human. As the video progresses, the woman goes about trying to carry on merely living, growing more obviously exhausted while the apathetic crowd ignores her plight. When she enters the subway, taking a much needed rest while she can, she is spotted by some kind of geek-rivethead, who seems to have intercepted the envelop seen earlier in the video. As the scene progresses, we have the rivethead following the prostitute without her knowledge as she grows more and more wearied. Admittedly, this builds up a lot of tension as to the rivethead’s motivations as lyrics mentioning “swimming in a world of creeps” and the whispered cite of the warning of God that “vengeance is mine” (Dueteronomy 32:35) build tension as to what exactly our rivethead’s intentions are. Finally, once the prostitute collapses, the rivethead removes a glowing bright orange orb from the envelope and inserts it into her mouth. It is my conjecture from my knowledge of philosophy that this is a visualization drawing from the Stoic conception of the soul – that of the divine spark issued from God. Similarly, we witness the painful process of the metal growths earlier receeding as the reinjection of the divine spark brings rehumanization. Our woman awakes in the airport with tickets to New York for a new start in life – it appears our rivethead is a modern rendition of The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). From this, on my own interpretation, the themes this song wishes to express are as follows:

A. Immorality brings about the dehumanization of the self and others. No person lives in a vacuum, and hence everything we do or do not do will affect other people.
B. For this reason, in the end we run the risk of the judgment of God in vengeance for our dehumanization of others. For this reason, we must see to it that we strive to do what is in our power to be agents of humanization by living morally and compassionately.

(To Be Continued)