List | V/A | 'How To Use Machinery III' CD 1994

'A Machinery Compilation'

Track:	Name:	Artist:	Time:
1.	Time Zero	Dance Or Die	4:30
2.	A Forest	Kriegbereit	3:25
3.	Nightmare	This Digital Ocean	5:03
4.	Revolution Time	Cubanate	5:20
5.	The City Sleeps	Trauma	4:07
6.	Factory	D.N.S.	6:14
7.	Reality Of Life	Static Icon	4:30
8.	New Colours	Northern Territories	5:30
9.	When The Feet Hurt	And One	5:42
10.	Somatime	Black Lung	2:45
11.	Feiert Das Kreuz Remix	Oomph!	5:18
12.	Reflections Of Hate	Syntec	3:40
13.	Naive Giant	Snog	3:32
14.	Blindfield 2	New Mind	4:10
15.	Serenity & Needles	Tear Ceremony	2:10
16.	Dear Valued Customer II	Snog	4:27
17.	Reprise	Northern Territories	3:29
	Total		73:52

Comments:

A compilation album from the German label Machinery Records that I got with my Release Magazine subscription. It's a decent compilation with some really great tracks. Here's a quick review:

Dance Or Die delivers one of the better tracks off their excellent album Everspring. Following that is a pretty good EBM-ish cover of a Cure song by Kriegbereit, a band I've never heard of previous to this compilation. If I'm not mistaken someone from Kriegbereit is now involved with Cobalt 60. This Digital Ocean is another band I've never heard of, and their track is a fairly good EBM-ish track, with whispered vocals in the (somewhat boring) verse and a better chorus (a bit like a cheaper Dance Or Die). Cubanate is a band I've heard lots of negative stuff about, but this is a quite good noisy EBM track with some aggro shouts for vocals. One of the better EBM tracks of this compilation. Trauma sounds more mellow and spacey, but with a slightly Eurodisco-ish beat. Still, it's also a rather good track, and the whispered vocals fit perfectly. D.N.S. don't strike me as being particularly original, neither in lyrical theme nor in musical style and especially not in mixing the two; industrial-EBM with sampled dist guitars.

I don't know how things got this messed up for Static Icon, but it might have something to do with the fact that Machinery is a German label and the band is Australian. The name on the cover is "Static I" and the song, a slow instrumental piano piece, is mis-labeled as 'Cold As Stone' when it is in fact 'Reality Of Life'. It's not a particularly representative track for the band; 'Cold As Stone' would have been a much better choice in that aspect, yet while very different this is also a very good track. Another non-German band is the Swedish duo Northern Territories, here with one of the weaker (but still quite good) tracks from their excellent debut album Midnight Ambulance. Following them is probably the most well-produced track of the compilation, a bouncy EBM-synthpop track from And One about something as trivial (really?) as hurting feet. A good track in true And One spirit. Black Lung seems drastically different in comparison; their track is a slow tinkly near-instrumental piece which sounds mostly like an intro. I suspect another mix-up like with Static Icon. Oomph is a band I'm not normally too fond of, but their mix of EBM, dist guitar riffs and shouted aggro vocals in German sounds very good to my ears here. "Feiert Das Kreuz", could that be something about burning crosses? I can't say what it's about, but the music is aggressive and pleasing.

Syntec is a band that I once thought was an EBM band (which I suppose they more or less were at one point), but after seeing them live at X-Ray in '96 I dismiss them as the East 17 of the EBM world; pathetic lyrics and less and less well crafted music sounding more and more like a cheap Eurodisco version of And One. I could hardly keep myself from laughing when the singer fondled his own crotch on stage, but the little fourteen-year-old girls in front of me seemed to love it. This song is a bit more EBM-ey than that though, but rather cheap at that, and the really German accent doesn't sound too good. Why am I even wasting an entire paragraph on this?

Snog is more pure EBM, but quite boring here. New Mind sounds a bit too much like a bad Skinny Puppy clone to me, but with added dist guitars. Maybe it's just me. Tear Ceremony plays a slow track with merely a bass guitar over some industrial noise and spoken vocals. Different, but not too well carried out here. More Snog: their second track is a slow, dark guitar-type ballad with spoken vocals, not too unlike the previous track but with more synthetic beats. Ending the compilation is an instrumental short version of Midnight Ambulance by Northern Territories - the original vocal version would be a better choice, but this will do. After all, it's a very good track.

In short, a decent compilation with its highs and lows, but perhaps a bit too focused on bad German EBM band. Wait a minute - isn't that what Machinery has the most?

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