Red Industrie - Destroyer

There is a lot of good on this album. However, there is a "but" that needs to follow that sentence when it comes to Destroyer and Red Industrie in general. Red Industrie, at the time of writing, are Helder Camberos (songwritting, production, studio & live male vocals) Fernando Diaz (studio & live guitars) and Danya Malashenkova (live fx, live female vocals & midi controls). Based in Guadalajara, Mexico, they have opened for Nitzer Ebb been remixed by a bunch of people and had many releases.

Lets begin with the good things about this album. The music. You can hear the influences from the early EBM scene, Nitzer Ebb, Fad Gadget, Fixmer/McCarthy, Front 242 etc etc. You can tell Helder has thought about his music and put it together well. Just the right amount of bass echo, saw sounds, strings, stabs and melodic loops. The percussion is nothing exotic or complicated just good crisp kicks and snares and sharp hi hats mechanically cruising through the tracks. It's EBM / Electro. That is what it's expected to sound like and I'm happy with that.

Destroyer is 13 tracks long, running the album for 59 minutes and a few seconds. Including three songs with guest vocalists, there are nine standard tracks with two remixes of "Body Of The Week" and a remix of "One Pain Killer" and "The Final Destruction".

Where this album falls down is the vocals. As an album listening experience, the vocals are just plain irritating. The same monotonous tonal clipped phrases become, by the third track annoying, by the fifth track painful. Even the tracks with guest vocals are interrupted by the monotone vocal and the remixes don't get the justice they deserve with the vocal style being in them which is a shame. However, if you took a track from the album and dropped it into a set of EBM it could work as a nice little change up.

As I write this paragraph I am listening to the album for the third time. I really really want to love this album because the music is fantastic, mechanical and electroclashy simple and I love that. The last track is the "Strafbomber dub remix" and to me that is the standout track due the least amount of vocals and the most similar to the standard album version. Its a club track that isn't genre specific and would work well as a dance track regardless of the crowd.

I was going to give it a 5 because of the vocals, but I have given it a 6 because as stand alone tracks, I can deal with them. But as an album, not so much. Jul 27 2013