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Noise Unit > Strategy Of Violence
CD Cleopatra 9475-2 CD Dossier DCD9035
Tracklist:
01. Corroded Decay 5.25
02. Hollow Ground 6.32
03. Hate You Feel 5.27
04. Assault 5.44
05. Carnage 5.17
06. Kick To Kill 4.07
07. Alle Gegen Alles 4.32
08. The Passage 5.17
09. No Soul, No Fear 6.27
Credits on Dossier version:
All songs written by Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber. Mixed by Chris Petterson and Noise Unit. Recorded at Target Studio. Cover Design by Techno Grafix.
Credits on Cleopatra Version:
All songs written by Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber. Mixed by Chris Petterson and Noise Unit Recorded at Target Studio. Design by Promo Design Associates.
Mindphaser Review
Exit Marc Verhagen, enter FLA. Although they've never publically alluded to anything as such, considering the original release date and sound of this album, the first without Marc Verhagen of the Klinik, it's obvious that this was at least partly constructed out of FLA - "Tactical Neural Implant" leftovers. The immersion of techno-rave oriented sounds in many of the tracks, something they were experimenting with at the time in TNI as well as the 2nd Intermix CD, gives that away. No matter though, as TNI was uniformally gold, and so even if these are just castaways they're still damn good enough to carry their own weight. There is a uniform sound though, make no mistake, and it works as an album in its own right. Bill described it at the time as the ultimate electro-industrial-punk album and I'd be hard pressed to disagree, even if it is essentially still FLA.
01. Corroded Decay 5.25
A sample from a committee talking about violence kicks us off, with a sampled guitar riff and mean appegiated bassline. A 4x4 kicks in with seemingly yet another bassline laced on top and chopped up manipulated guitars. The long guitar riff makes up the chorus with the dual basslines switching places. More stripped down than anything TNI but still has all the hallmarks of that era, with many loops, samples, chords, and little noises changing in the background. Leeb sings in a smooth distortion, a theme for the album as everything is striaght up take no prisoners electro-industrial. The 303 bleeps and rave noises start here, but don't take over until the next track.
02. Hollow Ground 6.32
Martial snare drumming (an idea taken from a few rave tracks at the time I'm sure) starts this track with a big marching dance beat and off all things a 2Unlimited sample done in the Rhys style of being normal in one ear and distorted in the other. This track is hard as all hell, like a rave from the 9th circle. Another dual bassline, dark & huge, comes in followed by higher techno-y synths and heavily robotic distorted vocals. At many points there are punctuated chords that seem to emulate the 2Unlimited track "Twilight Zone" (which was filling football stadiums everywhere at the time) only much harder. Awkward part in the middle with the bassline being chopped up kind of sloppily IMO, but the rest of the song finishes in an absolute storm of stompy madness. Great track.
03. Hate You Feel 5.27
This track is the closest in sound to what Noise Unit had previously been, with a very atmospheric sense of darkness to it due to the odd samples. A fast, pounding, but not 4x4 beat relentlessly slams away with a distant distorted bassline and numerous higher octave synth sequences. Samples of evil laughter loop around with Leeb singing in a more sinister tone. Lots of breaks and bridges ease the monotony of the beat. Wanna know how layered the boys made stuff back in 1992? I've listened to this track probably 500 times in the past and I've just NOW discovered a new sequence I never hoticed before while reviewing this!
04. Assault 5.44
Caustic Grip styled chords, similar to the begining of "Threshold" from that album start off along with a more typical electro 4x4 beat kicks in with a classic Leeb bassline to go with it. The synths are truncated like the CG era and this track woulda fit right in on the 'Virus' single to be sure. More heavy distortion on the vocals in this one. The verses are pretty aggressive, but the chorus is absolutely soaring and quite melodic with high atmospheric strings and fluttering chords building on one another in a very epic manner.
05. Carnage 5.17
Another typical electro-style midtempo beat for this one, along with another CG style bassline although the synth noise is alot fatter. An average track, but there's a great hook in this wet, neural sounding chordline that comes in the verse breaks. Lyrics are what you'd expect with a title like that: death, destruction, mangled bodies, etc. The chorus and chordline helpfully carry the whole track, feeling very tense and eerie.
06. Kick To Kill 4.07
Break out your glowsticks! Well, almost. Very interesting track that literally straddles between hardcore electro-industrial and pacifier sucking candy rave. A manic distorted Leeb rants some pretty good lyrics actually about hurting you, heh, on top of a pretty funky bassline. The beat is total electro but there are so many rave hallmarks like lasers, disco cymbals, and the illustrious Hoover synth. Loud, quirky yet aggressive, you'll def. dance to this and dance HARD. I think this deserves the label of "electro-punk" the most.
07. Alle Gegen Alles 4.32
A neat little track, delightful in absurdity from the deep distorted Germanic vocals to the best sample ever, "Where the fuck is my ambulance??" and, well, ambulance noises. A slow but bouncey 4x4 beat carries the track along with thick synth bass and the whole thing kind of reminds me of Intermix's "Cum & Get It!" off the first album albeing a bit slower. Everything goes double-pace a few times, with chirping laser noises and heavier beat elements. Odd track but it totally works. First time Leeb's sung in his native tounge I believe.
08. The Passage 5.17
The only instrumental on this album (boy would that change), this is closer to Delerium than anything else. Looped dripping cave noises and reverbed mechanical clanking start that breaks to a slow collapsing pounding which in turn breaks into looped wind chimes and a slow voodoo styled breakbeat. Vivid imagery in this track, it lives up to the title and you can see yourself traveling through a cave in the jungle listening to it. Would fit right in with anything on 'Spiritual Archives' I think, and in fact the strings remind me of "Barren Ground" off of that album. Distant almost atonal basslines, and more crashing sounds round everything off ending with the cave drips again.
09. No Soul, No Fear 6.27
The album ends with another hard dance anthem, with an appegiated harsh bassline combo much like the first track on top of a heavy 4x4 beat and numerous operatic choral samples. The vocals are kinda distorted like the first track too. A simple track that's a bit average but still interesting because of the opera samples take the place of the usual strings in places and it's use of double-time tempo changes in the beat and extremely pitched down guitar loops.
Overall a highly enjoyable CD. Even if it is just TNI extras, the boys still saw that all together they made an energetic album that you can jump around to or put on when playing fight games. A must for any FLA fan or collector, this was at their peak when even the most boring or average track from them would still have some pretty damn interesting elements to notice. Not as smooth or diverse as TNI, this album is just electro-industrial/ebm done the absolute right way and great to rock out to, which was it's intention.
Review by Doug Sudia (recoil)
Al Crawford Review
Noise Unit was originally a collaboration between Bill Leeb (Front Line Assembly, Delerium, Intermix) and Marc Verhaegen (The Klinik, X10 and others). Later on they drafted in Leeb's colleague Rhys Fulber for the second album and now, for the third album, they've disposed of Verhaegen converting Noise Unit from a rather interesting collaboration into Yet Another Front Line Assembly Spinoff.
Well, almost. Although it's certainly the case that _Strategy Of Violence_ lacks some of the Verhaegen touches (more analogue synths and effects, more "noise") that made the earlier Noise Unit releases distinctively different from Front Line Assembly, most of the tracks here do have a style of their own. It's not exactly the Noise Unit sound, but then again it's not just more Front Line Assembly either.
Before I continue I'd like to make clear that all my talk of "varied" and "different" is being measured on a Leeb/Fulber axis. There's nothing on this album that moves more than a little from the FLA sound in absolute terms (i.e. no sudden bursts of country and western, gospel singing, heavy metal or bubblegum pop), but it does dot around a bit within the musical territory staked out by their various projects. So if you think that all their music sounds the same, you're not liable to find this one any different. Spotting the stylistic variations requires more familiarity with their work than that. You have been warned.
Given that Noise Unit had been all but written off for dead some time ago, the appearance of this album came as something of a surprise to me. Listening to it (and with the supporting evidence of the wonderful track "Falling" credited to Noise Unit on the recent _Dossiers_ label sampler), it's my guess that the Noise Unit name has become a repository for all the music Leeb and Fulber produce that can't be neatly pigeon-holed into one of their existing projects (this, apparently, being the way they work - they write the song then decide afterwards which of their projects it suits best).
It might be expected that this would result in an inconsistent album but far from it, _Strategy Of Violence_ is quite possibly my favourite Leeb/Fulber project of the past year. I certainly prefer it to _Tactical Neural Implant_ (which was probably the strongest FLA album) and there's not a lot between this and the first Intermix album either.
The disc kicks off with "Corroded Decay", essentially a Front Line Assembly track but one that seems to pick up where _Caustic Grip_ left off rather than adopting the smoother, more melodic approach that characterised _Tactical Neural Implant_. It's loud, driving, with sampled guitar riffs, the usual assortment of electronic whooshes and crunches, plenty of vocal samples and hoarser (or at least more heavily distorted) vocals than usual. Classic "hard" FLA.
"Hollow Ground" is something of an oddity and a track that's *almost* very good indeed but that trips at the last fence. It combines martial snare drumming, heavily distorted vocals and a whumping dance beat but very nearly earns a thumbs down due to the gratuitous overuse of an extremely cliched sick-cow techno-style synth noise. In the end the track's sheer energy and aggression win out, but it'd have been a lot better if they'd removed the sounds of synthetic bovine malaise and put something original in instead.
"Hate You Feel" is more of a typical Front Line Assembly track. True, the vocals are slightly more distorted and the samples slightly weirder than usual, and the track's more reminiscent of very early (_The Initial Command_) FLA than recent material, but the track is a Front Line Assembly song, pure and simple.
The same is more or less true of "Assualt" (their spelling, not mine) which opens with Delerium-esque atmospherics before heading into typical FLA percolating synths and a sample that sounds suspiciously like Bill has been watching Star Trek. "Carnage" also stays on a well-trodden path (I'm sure I've heard that metallic clanking noise before) and could be segued into any FLA album with no problems. Quite a good track though with some nice samples, it's just a shame that the melodic theme that eventually emerges after a couple of minutes isn't used more heavily.
"Kick To Kill" moves into more techno-oriented territory. Well, sorta. From another point of view it could be dismissed as just a faster than usual Front Line Assembly track but it often seems that the difference between the two genres amounts to little more than the BPM and the synth sounds used. By that definition, this track falls somewhere between olde-style electronic body music and techno - techno synth sounds, techno BPM, but with typically distorted EBM-style vocals.
"Alle Gegen Alles" is very atypical, from the odd "Where the fuck is my ambulance?" sample to the quirkily springy beat (reminiscent of the track "Paradissiets" from Cyberaktif's _Tenebrae Vision_) to the vocals which are a) in German and b) deeper and more distorted than Leeb's usual vox. Decidedly odd and very good.
"The Passage" is more Delerium-esque in nature, being constructed largely of samples. True, it's got a beat (eventually), but it's a slow one and the pretty chimes, moody string synths and lack of vocals place it much more firmly in the Delerium realm than in FLA territory. Excellent.
The disc is rounded off by the impressive "No Soul, No Fear", _Caustic Grip_ era "hard" FLA meets orchestral/operatic samples a la Intermix's "Requiem Dub". Good stuff indeed.
This album isn't about to win Bill and Rhys any new fans - if you didn't like what's gone before, chances are you won't like this either - but it is an impressive effort and, as I've already said, probably my favourite piece of music from this duo's impressive output over the last year. Front Line Assembly fans should certainly try to get hold of this one. One or two of the tracks might appeal to the "I like Delerium but I don't like FLA" brigade but that's probably not enough to justify the album's purchase. Note that my rating below really only reflects the album's worth to someone who already likes the Front Line Assembly sound - I'm just too familiar with FLA and related projects to pretend I could give anything like an objective rating of this.
As for availability - Third Mind should be kicking themselves for not getting the rights to this in Europe which is annoying since Dossier's distribution isn't as good, but I suppose there's a chance Third Mind/Roadrunner might license this from Dossier at some time for release in The Other Place. Failing that, it should be available on import.
Erland Rating: +3 (for the FLA-ed, at least)
(c)Al Crawford
Review from Music From The Empty Quarter around time of release. (Exact publication date unknown.)
NOISE UNIT STRATEGY OF VIOLENCE
Dossier DCD9035 CD
Are they taking the proverbial piss? I wonder? So, each project has its own sound? Not any more it hasn't, the lines drawn between FLA, Intermix, Noise Unit, etc., are becom?ing so narrow that overkill has begun to taint the results of the undoubtedly talented Leeb and Fulber duo. In the case of Noise Unit it was Marc Verhaeghan's input and influence which held the material away from the unmistakable FLA sound. On Strategy Of Violence the ex-Klinik man hasn't even been involved and what's here could so easily have been a Caustic Grip follow-up if the softer side of Tactical Neural Implant hadn't been employed. What am I saying then, that this is a terrible record? No, of course not. It's a bloody good album, there are a few outstanding moments such as the machine wailing of Hate You Feel, but I have to express the cheated feelings of a fair number of genuine FLA fans (one of them sitting right here). By all means give us three or four records a year, but don't try and hide them under different names and expect us to accept them under the merits of anything other than Front Line Assembly. Strategy Of Violence is one of the best FLA albums, but it isn't the best Noise Unit.
Deadhead
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Last updated 2006-11-07 18:03:02 by: recoil.
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