Titles like "Helmet Mounted Display" are like a bat signal to a certain type of militaria-preoccupied EBM nerd which I will absolutely 100% cop to being myself. Before you've even heard a single note you know that a band called Chrome Corpse with an EP called Helmet Mounted Display is going to bring lashings of cyberpunk-tinged militaristic imagery drawn from the kind of early 90s action films you'd find only on VHS in charity shops or the 99p basket at Woolworths.
Having got overexcited about countless bands whose tunes failed to deliver what their aesthetic seemed to promise, I was prepared to be disappointed by this release. But it turns out the music on this thing goes beyond merely being "good enough to justify the Universal Soldier vibes" to being really fucking good. Far from being all flak jacket and no knickers, the Seattle quartet bring the electronic, the body and the music in spades. We're talking properly hard EBM. Not harsh EBM. If you don't know the difference, revisit your least favourite Velvet Acid Christ song and then listen to Chrome Corpse. You will dance, you will stomp, you will shout along with the chorus, you'll wonder if the song "Dance or Die" is an EBM reworking of Good Life.
They don't seem especially bothered about slavishly copying the EBM 'look' either. From the few pics I've seen on Facebook, it appears that Chrome Corpse dress like a bunch of regular norms, which you are fully entitled to do if you sound like the hardest possible combination of Nitzer, DAF & 242. These lads have made EBM fun again without sacrificing a single iota of groove or smidge of aggression. They've made EBM! They have unashamedly made Electronic fucking Body Music with all the trimmings. Do I wish Chrome Corpse looked like Front 242 in their pomp? No, but I do think it would be extremely funny and endearing if they all dressed up as Front 242 for Halloween.
Tell Chad with the tribal tatted biceps, carefully curated piercings and £5000 Rick Owens kecks that a sexy macho rivet head aesthetic is worth precisely nada if you can't back it up with neck-snapping 16-bar arpeggios, militant robotic funk and a very real sense that you are being ordered to party or die. The Corpse are the real fucking deal and they still would be if they wore clown shoes or covered themselves in fluorescent paint or dressed like a bunch of lumbersexual indie folk nebbishes from 2010.