that have emerged from the industrial swamp in the not-quite-a-decade-yet since Youth Code went off like a depth charge and gave our stale & ailing genre the Glasgow kiss of life - all of which are still making me giddy with excitement every time they announce a new release:
- HIDE - a dark, noisy, abrasive & occasionally higly disturbing glimpse into the minds of Seth Sher and Heather Gabel
- Total Leatherette - shrouded in sleaze & amyl nitrate vapours, like the soundtrack to a low budget 70s skin flick shot entirely on 8mm and left to gather dust on a shelf in the back room of a Soho sex shop for 40 years
- Cardinal & Nun - as above but propelled kicking & screaming onto the dance floor by fast and dirty Suicide-esque electronic rhythms
- Word Made Flesh - where dark ambient, spoken word, industrial techno and occasional jagged glass splinters of guitar collide
- PC World - cracked LCD screen 80s cyberpunk aesthetic electro body synth punk
- Null Split - an angry, vibrant blast of many different styles but mostly EBM
- Soft Issues - raging, howling, screeching, blistering, industrial techno-informed power electronics from Leeds
- Multiple Man - icy yet warm, mechanical yet groove-laden, with that spooky Fairlight vocal sample as their trademark riff these lads eerily (but NEVER obtusely or non-danceably) recall an 80s band that you've never actually heard because it has never existed, because Ministry hopped on the metal train before taking their collaboration with Cabaret Voltaire any further, before the world could hear what Twitch might sound like if the Cabs had come down to Southern Studios from Sheffield and crashed Al & Adrian Sherwood's recording sessions, or, even more tantalisingly, what would have happened if Al had ever got round to fully fleshing out his vision for Programming the Psychodrill* - this band, unlike many minimal synth / coldwave / retro acts out there, suggest another possible future, rather than repeating the tropes of the 80s note for note - now that's true hauntology baby!!!
*Al Jourgensen interviewed in Ipso Facto in 1987: "I have a new band that's just me, which is a new sound that nobody's ever done before... That's me, a Marshall stack and a Fairlight, that's all. I'm starting from scratch, station wagon tour, no rock star. I'm just going to go out and break people's fucking eardrums if I can because if that's the only way I can make them open their eyes to what's going on that's what I'll do."