1992 : Tactical_Neural_Implant
QUOTE:
"If you are looking for the milestones in the history of industrial music, look back at the 1990-1992 years and listen to some of the best releases ever made in the genre. In these years, technology for music creation was still in full evolvement, and some musicians were really experimenting to search for the limits of what the available equipment could do. Not only to find new sounds, but also to put them in more sophisticated music, to discover new textures from these new sounds and use them in different ways. These discoveries would establish standards for years of music to come. In that time, listening to that music gave to us the feeling of listening to the future... and so it was, listening to the same stuff today doesn't make us feel out-of-date... Of these "classics", one came from Front Line Assembly. In 1992 the "Tactical Neural Implant" album was released and is still the most famous production we know from this band. Even today fans are discussing a lot about this album, many of them feeling that this is the ultimate album that Leeb and friends have ever produced.
What made this album so brilliant was it`s textures. Although still a kind of industrial music, this one added a new level of complexity in song structure and composition, while being somehow more accessible to new fans, less aggressive, less abrasive, more melodic, and also more dance-oriented. The previous album (Caustic Grip) showed a new tendency to use sound sampling as a main component of the music. This time the samples are really omnipresent, mostly extracted from sci-fi and action movies, but also from industrial and techno musical sources and from the machines themselves: sound bits created and morphed in unique ways on any electronic stuff, then sampled to make a new instrument or a new rhythmic element. Noteable are the "very electronic but non-abrasive" sounds that populate all songs. All these together create aural atmospheres and unique soundscapes of their own, mixing gothic feelings with ambiences from virtual worlds a la Blade Runner, wrapped into dancey, layered songs that you can easily become addicted to. Some people say this is "soundtrack music for the dance floor" or, in the inverse mindpath, "dance music for the living room". Personaly I describe this as "dance music for earphones", because you need to devote all your attention to it. Behind the main groove of each song there are many tiny details. Each listening session makes you discover a new sound, a new loop buried somewhere behind. The very layered nature of the compositions means that listening again and again, these songs won't become annoying over time.
And if you like the vocal side of music, this album pushed the limits of vocal processing where it has never been before. They managed to alter the voices so much to give them new personalities, adapted to each song. This is not aggressive distorsion : this is vocal re-creation that gives me the impression that not only can humans sing, but also their mind, a voice becoming something else than a physical characteristic of a human being. And the lyrics are, in my opinion, the best of all FLA albums, previous and next, still in the usual themes of death, technology domination, apocalyptic wars, etc. The samples often complete the lyrics. The album also demonstrated at its best the talents of the nearly-third member of the band : Greg Reely. Making a music so dense and so complex, yet, so easy to listen to was unique to that guy. By the way he morphed each song and placed it in the aural bandwidth, he created tri-dimensional atmospheres from the music Leeb and Fulber created that a Dolby Pro-Logic audio system is necessary to reproduce it as it was the sound of a movie. Music seldom play as well as movies on Pro-Logic systems, except TNI...
I could end this review with a song-by-song review, but I'll let you discover it for yourself. Some highlights: the first song "Final Impact", a mid-speed song with brillant textures, the second track "The Blade" with its house flavor, the third one "Mindphaser" which became a classic, and the ultimate FLA track "Gun": beginning slow and ambient, adding layers one by one, until its gets to a kind of military techno-industrial hymn that is amazing."
NOTE : highly recommended for newbies to industrial or FLA
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1994 : Millennium
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1995 : Hard_Wired
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1996 : Live_Wired
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Complete Total Terror [2004] REMASTERED
Disc 11-01 Total Terror (6:24)
1-02 A Decade (5:01)
1-03 Rebels In Afghanistan (5:14)
1-04 Developing Suicide (4:42)
1-05 Black Fluid (5:35)
1-06 Falling There (4:28)
1-07 All You Do (4:21)
1-08 Seeing Is Believing (4:33)
1-09 Empty Walls (4:45)
1-10 Enemy Number One (4:19)
1-11 On The Cross (5:52)
1-12 Freedom (5:45)
1-13 Distorted Vision (5:44)
1-14 Cleanser (2:16)
Disc 2
2-01 Assassination (5:56)
2-02 Intensive Care Unit (5:04)
2-03 Immobilized (4:10)
2-04 They’re Going To Kill Us All (5:52)
2-05 Stimulant Combat (6:10)
2-06 Hatred By Society (4:11)
2-07 Intruder (5:24)
2-08 Face Puller (7:03)
2-09 A.E.C. Krunch (6:21)
2-10 Cro-Magnon (6:17)
2-11 Guilty (2:24)
2-12 Attack Decay (3:59)
2-13 The Bonening (5:24)
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