Placebo Effect - Gargoyles & Galleries

Re-released this year as part of Infacted's 'Classics' collection, Placebo Effect are without any doubt at all one of the most loved bands from the early, Zoth Ommog, mid 90s era of Dark Electro. After an unfortunate split, a name change to 'Breathe', and another recent one to 'The Laughing Dolls', this famous act is in our living rooms for one more time.
This cd compiles the 1992 debut album "Galleries of Pain", and the 1990 demotape "Gargoyles".

Eighteen tracks; the majority of which are under three and a half minutes (exclusing a couple of whoppers) is a mammoth of an undertaking, but I feel a comfortable bliss and familiarity through this CD, and the early days of some of my favourite acts such as yelworC, De Vermiis Mysteriis and A Thousand Societies are relived over and over again on 'Gargoyles & Galleries'.

Much like today's Dark Electro, the material here is slow and unsettling, frequently filtered with despair-laden vocals, chord progressions and instrumentation that occasionally resembles a black mass, and enough hints of the occult to make an overpowering casserole of blasphemy. However, Placebo Effect at no time come across as an overdone, satanic, hellish group, and the subtlety with which these fusions are met is almost sacred. At no time do I believe that the band realise how much of a cult record this will go down as (for the second time). I also do not believe that they realised how loved this genre would become among the occultists and spiritualists that graduated from the 1980s.

'Psychotrauma' and 'Poison Tree' are as much of a one-two assault as anything by the average noise act in the 2010s - despite how much musical software, production, and creativity has expanded throughout the EBM universe, it's so painstakingly true that you should never abandon the origins.

Placebo Effect, for an hour have made me understand what it was like to be witnessing the birth of Dark Electro in 1992, at a time when I was happily cutting football photographs out of a magazine, this entire underground culture that was to become a beacon of my adult life was being exposed to the world around me, and almost like a time machine, I'm back there again.

'Brain Entropy' and 'Agony of Mind' personify the Dark Electro stereotype, and almost 20 years later still stand out among the more withered of its audience.

Quite frankly a welcome, unwavering blast from the past. Who doesn't love rare demo tapes on CD? Nov 03 2011