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Front Line Assembly: Improvised Electronic Device

  Tobias Fischer

Canadian industrial pioneer Bill Leeb – who’s got trance club hits, collaborations with Sarah McLachlan and other notable things under his belt – still heads up Front Line Assembly, but the question here is where is Rhys Fulber, Leeb’s FLA cohort?

Answer: who cares when it’s this heavy (Fulber is back hawking more Delerium-style dance stuff with Conjure One, which is nothing to sneeze at either). Not that it’s necessarily Fulber’s fault that 2006’s Artificial Soldier was a hookless phone-in aside from the four-barrel industrial trancer “The Storm,” but Leeb appears to be playing catch-up to the old Leeb, the one who helped found Skinny Puppy and who taught Rammstein the ins and outs of jackbooted snarling. While Artificial Soldier concentrated on – well, I don’t know, boring toothless industrial, IED is quite the worthy do-over, with renewed interest in badass breakbeats, old-time Puppy vitriol (some nice deep-seated hatred in several spots, such as the spotlight track “Shifting Through the Lens”) and apocalyptic drone.

I don’t want to start anything, but, yeah, if previous fails are directly traceable to Fulber, well, arrivederch, and stuff.

By Eric Saeger

Homepage: Frontline Assembly
Homepage: Metropolis Records