The latest from Architect recaptures a lot of what I used to enjoyabout industrial club music without playing in the regrettable sandboxof melodrama and bad rhyming couplets that forced me to leave most ofthat music behind a decade ago. This is boot-stomping beat musicthat I don't feel ashamed to blast even if I'm not heading to a club.Hymen
If I were still of a mind to lace up my combat boots and stomp-danceuntil the wee hours of the night in a smoke-drenched hole in the wall,this would likely be my favorite record of the year. Architect is theproject of Daniel Meyer, who’s probably best known as a member of thelate-blooming industrial act Haujobb. I jumped the industrial shipsometime around 1994 just as a new crop of post Skinny Puppy bands wereemerging and filling the holes left by longtime industrial danceveterans who had either gotten too old to look good in leather or hadmoved on to more lucrative forms of music making. As a result, Haujobbflew by me completely, but I can understand and hear where Daniel Meyeris coming from on his latest release for Hymen.
There’s adistinctly technological edge to the music—sounds are processed andsynthesized in an obviously mechanical way—but the sound design isstill sharp and appropriate. The rhythms remain tied to a dance flooraesthetic, thus tying the record to it’s past, but there’s nothingstomp-stomp-stomp about the album. Most of the snare drums are replacedwith bursts of static noise while the kick drums splatter like adistorted 808 running wild. The album feels like the perfectly logical,but still fruitful and progressive result of a scene that has recycleditself more than it has reinvented. When artists stray too far awayfrom the strobe light and technolust aesthetic, they are oftendismissed by the scene-faithful as style traitors. I can see Architectappealing to the purists without pandering to them. This album couldeasily be the “gateway drug” for the diehard boots-and-goggles crowdinto a world of music outside of their comfort zone, and that is alwaysa good thing.
Aside from winning the ‘Quickest Sample Turnaround from Movie to Album’ award for dialogue that’s lifted from Sin City,the album also reminds me that there was a reason that I liked themusic I found in high school, and it didn’t always have to do withchanting and being pissed at the world. This is the sort of thing thatI had hoped would grow out of the halcyon days of industrial danceclubs, and while many of Architect’s peers are still recycling thevocal distortion, stage posturing, themes, beats, and glowstickdreadlocks from 15 years ago, Meyer seems to be moving forward, if everso slightly, to keep it fun.
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