In the only track of this single, Corroded Master meshes industrial beats and hissing vocals with glimmering synth loops and bass drones. Though it’s an odd mix, it works well enough, and the repetitive nature of the lyrics gets obscured enough by the instrumentation to make it through to the end without becoming too obnoxious.
Bagging up some unreleased tunes, this compilation offers up EBM with a stiffly industrial edge to its rhythms and synth voices. Steady beat-loops with hi-hat samples and ‘oontz oontz oontz’ drum machine compression (plus a few requisite drops of the Amen Break) mark every song, most of which come off as practice runs for more fully-realized tracks. The big exception is “The Invasion”, the ~7-minute closer, which unloads one percussion attack after another, rolling smoothly from one 4/4 to the next, packing in additional beat layers over each other, and escalating a background howl while doing so. That last track is enough to make the EP worth picking up on its own, though the rest remains kind of dicey.
Opening with its title track, this EP jumps into 4/4 beats, gleaming synth tones, and harsh, electronically-processed vocals rasping out fairly goofy lyrics about dehumanization. The following songs, with martial/mechanical names like “A Show of Force” and “The Abyssal Machine”, follow similar formulations, with the vocals (which appear more often than not in a dreamy, almost Cure-like moan) receiving the widest degrees of variation. Though there’s good work put into the texturing, channel separation, and other production, the songs never really feel like much more than exercises in assembly, with little emotional or rhythmic pull to their loop arrangements (the dip into techno-metal with “The Abyssal Machine” being practically the only exception). Technically respectable, but unmemorable.
Packing four mixes of the title track, plus two for “Light”, this single leads with the base mix of “Bodycount”, a standard 4/4 electro-industrial stomper, with bit-crushed synths and compressed, hissing vocals livening up the hi-hat and bass kick staples. Aside from dragging things out to five minutes and change, it’s not too bad, but that’s about twice as long as it needs to effectively communicate its ideas. “Bodycount (Traumatize remix)” follows, playing up the synths and down-mixing the percussion to put a more dance-friendly twist on the steady pulses; “Bodycount (Count Gets Higher mix by Tactical Module)” brings a harder kick and shriller key squeals into play while shuffling up the rhythms; and “Bodycount V2″ stirs up more fluttery synth touches while bringing the vocals to higher clarity.
On the “Light” side, the original mix of that song moves to a slower pace, rolling along on slow kick-claps and protracted metallic scrapes, while the vocals indistinctly burble and echo, and “Light (Core Red Core remix)” swings the synth sweeps a bit wider, but otherwise stays pretty much the same. Decent material, but nothing outstanding.
With selections ranging back to 1999′s Fun with Knives album (skipping past the group’s first seven years of output), this ‘best of’ compilation features some of Velvet Acid Christ’s singles alongside new remixes and a few more recent/obscure picks. The group’s characteristic mix of EBM synths, dark beats, hissing vocal treatment, and handfuls of samples from films and video games fills the collection, and though it’s not quite a direct chronology, the track order does trace a general path from older to newer material, which helps highlight the shift in style from manically cartoonish energy to more reserved brooding.
As it covers almost two decades of the band’s history, it’s perhaps not the outright shifts in style which are notable as much as the refinement of retained qualities along the way. The drum machine percussion, for instance, is practically the same in terms of song-writing through the years, but the cleaning up of its sonics and lining against the other rhythms attains audible improvement, while the meshing of textures and improved balancing of the volume dynamics also stand out with their rising polish through the track-list. A little too broad in scope to give listeners a clear idea of VAC’s most common MO, but as a cross-cut of their more commercially successful years, it does its job well.
Hard EBM and electro-industrial trappings mark the six songs of this EP, with raspy grunts, hissing growls, steady hi-hat beats, chopped and repeated vocal samples, and layers of compressed keyboard waves hitting 4/4 base-lines. Half of the tracks are remixes (two of them targeting the same song), which introduces a little variety to the proceedings, some of the breaks go off in interesting directions, and the rhythms are usually pretty good at keeping momentum rolling through the changes, but in the end (outside of the draggy malfunction groove of “Bodycount (Acid Trash remix)”), there’s just not a lot to help it stand out from the masses of similar industrial-tinged EBM.
Scrambled Brains 