Source: Last FM
If you listened to Kill Memory Crash's album American Automatic before knowing where the band was from, it probably wouldn't come as a shock to learn that they were from Chicago. On the other hand, if someone described Kill Memory Crash as "an industrial dance type band from Chicago" before playing the album you might well be caught off guard by how fresh, original, and not at all like a Ministry or Thrill Kill Kult side project they sound.
This ain't Grandpa Jourgensen's olde-fasioned industrial rocke. It isn't EBM. It's not electro-industrial. What the fuck is it? Industrial electro? That's far too narrow a label for a sound as heterogenous as this (which for all its diversity somehow still sounds distinctly, cohesively and inarguably KMC at all times). I don't rememember exactly when I bought American Automatic but it has been in heavy rotation for over a decade by now. These ten tracks clocking in at a total of fifty minutes (a perfect length for an album in any genre, in my opinion) represent the platonic form of a sound that nobody else had even attempted, or has attempted since.
Kill Memory Crash's signature sound is a sickly but curiously compelling cocktail of strange, sinister, robotic vocals (never raised, somewhat distorted but nothing at all like the ridiculous goblin shrieks dominating EBM at the time), a cryptic, unique, disturbing and innovative sonic palette, and the application of distortion to satisfyingly hard-kicking beats without resorting to the square wave 909 tactics some industrial acts like to borrow from gabber. All of which their only full-length album has in spades. There's something quite druggy about the whole thing, like some powerful medication is wearing off and the narrator is trying to make sense of his confusion and paranoia. It feels akin to Broken or early Chemlab in spirit if not sound: industrial rock's processed guitar crunch is completely absent from the KMC sound. Lesser industrial bands have been known to adopt guitars as a way of masking weaknesses in their programming or song structure, something which doesn't sound like it would ever be an issue for a band as tight as Kill Memory Crash.
KMC rocking the fuck out with live drummer Gabriel Palomo
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's talk about the year I turned 16, the year I think I might have started to become aware of "industrial music" as a combination of words if nothing else, but a few years before I discovered this astonishingly inventive band. Let's talk about 2005.
2005
2005 wasn't a great year for danceable, club-friendly industrial music (hell, were the 00s a good decade for industrial music in general?). VNV Nation released what would turn out to be the last album of theirs I can just about tolerate. With a new Nine Inch Nails album came an admittedly pretty catchy lead single that would for a while replace Closer as the number 1 most overplayed NIN song in sticky-floored goth pubs and university rock clubs across the land. Meanwhile, in Norway, your man from Icon of Coil had slapped on a bit of juggalo makeup and launched a side project called Combichrist, which would soon be as unavoidable in the goth-industrial scene as the sight of socks under open-toed sandals at a beer festival. It was two years since DAF had staged a fairly credible comeback with Fünfzehn neue D.A.F.-Lieder and 14 years since the release of Tyranny For You, probably the last truly great EBM album.
Enter Alex SanFaçon and Adam Sieczka, a pair of house and techno DJs who had signed to Ghostly International in 2002 and released the gloriously grimy When The Blood Turns Black EP. With a club music pedigree that set them apart from your average bunch of rivet heads, the KMC sound machine was nonetheless a boldly left-field choice for Ghostly, and must surely rank as the electronica label's darkest, nastiest signing to date. This mix from 2005 gives a good idea of where KMC's heads were at musically - some dark, murky space in the cracks between electro, techno and industrial:
I've often wondered how this crossing of streams came about. Did the members of Kill Memory Crash grow up on goth/alt/industrial club standards - your Headhunters, your Juke Joint Jezebels, your Smothered Hopes - and consciously choose to forge their own path well away from the latex & leather histrionics they'd become all too familiar with? Or did they create one of the finest industrial albums of the century by accident, as complete ingenues who perhaps stumbled across Twitch or Front By Front completely by chance one day while crate digging or surfing the net (as we used to call "browsing the World Wide Web" back in the day) and thought to themselves "hang on, we've got machines for making music and we know how to use em, we could have a crack at this"? I suspect it's probably the former, because without knowing which cliches to avoid there would surely be more of them littering the album (as we'll see, American Automatic isn't entirely free of North American industro-angst cliches).
Track by track (front by front, beat by beat...)
The album gets straight down to business. Riyout comes crashing in on a beat that sounds as crunchy as broken glass on the surface but when you force yourself to tune out some of the distortion you realise it's underpinned by what is basically just a simple electro beat, albeit one that slams hard and relentless for the entire track.
The title track slows it down to a creepy pace, and pretty much seals the album's claim to having the best drum sound (and as will become apparent before the album is halfway done, most inventive use of said drums) of any industrial album since Land Of Rape And Honey.
Crash V8 flings you abruptly back onto the dance floor. Musically and lyrically one of the most straightforward tracks on the album, and understandably the lead single, its fury increases throughout in a way that feels unchained by EBM's rigid discipline. Even some fairly standard lyrical fluff about “America under control” and “can't think for myself” can't hold back the sheer force of this track. A lean, mean synthesised bass line, stomping kick drums and a truly nasty six-note synth pattern join the fray halfway through.
Doorway Nine (no relation to the BBC series Inside No. 9, but I'd love to see Shearsmith & Pemberton work Kill Memory Crash into an episode somehow) is where the electro influence becomes more obvious, with a robotic voice telling (warning?) us that “now it's time for doorway nine” over thudding backbeats and stuttering synths. The golden thread of industrial music's experimental approach still runs through this track via a restrained sprinkling of headphone-confusing glitches and echoes.
UTIU is the strangest song on the album so far. Perdition City -era Ulver is my strongest reference point for this territory. Some distant sound, deliberately buried in the mix, could possibly be a looped bass guitar riff. An even uglier sound near the end could also be a bass guitar but christ alone knows what you'd need to do it to produce such a response.
The O is a truly haunting monster of a track, a towering monolith of bass where the drums feel rooted in one spot while great billowing dark smog clouds of synthesised noise swirl around it. It's as vertical as Crash V8 is horizontal - this machine is polluting, expanding into the sky, rather than driving forwards at that unrelenting freight train pace. The spooky synths at the start could become so much goth cheese in the hands of lesser machinists but KMC back them up with a monstrous wall of low frequencies and a subtly martial beat. “She woke me up in London / and told me the news / she took my ass to see him / and told me to choose” Adam cryptically intones. Over the years I've sometimes found myself obsessing over these lines. Who woke him up in London? What was the news? 9/11? I hope I never figure it out. My inability to crack the enigma that is American Automatic is part of what has kept me hooked all these years.
Never Forget is a straight-up EBM number that seems to have been strategically placed in the second half of the album, possibly as a breather after the crushing, oppressive doom of The O. I don't want to claim KMC can do straight-up EBM better than the best straight-up EBM bands, because they can't, but it is a solid tune nonetheless, sacrificing none of that unmistakeable Kill Memory Crash sonic inventiveness on the dance floor. But to some extent, true EBM does require a stripping down of sonic flair to directly target the twitching muscles of those who simply want to dance, and I'm glad KMC stuck to what they're best at. Not that they've gone completely unnoticed in EBM circles: it was a delightful surprise to hear this song pop up in a great mix a year or two ago by some Berlin-adjacent dark techno bod whose name it's killing me to try and remember.
Demento is another peculiar track. Live-sounding drums beat a mid-paced path through a staticky haze of flickering strobe-lit steel and concrete and I'm back in the eerily deserted multi-storey carpark that exists in the corner of my mind where it's always 3am. There are vocal samples, some of the robotic speak & spell kind, others distinctly culled from a media source, but god knows where, and saying god knows what. That faint and distorted outline of a bass guitar. A bleeping telephone. A brief slide guitar twang. About two minutes in a distorted synth comes in and the drums descend to another, deeper, heavier level. The kind of bass we're dealing with here is the kind that Techno Bass Crew deals in - appearing out of nowhere, detached from anything so organic as the vibration of the strings on a bass guitar or even the pressing of a key on a synth. Not exactly an essential highlight of the album, but only because of tough competition from all the other tracks.
Two tracks left. What tricks can KMC possibly pull out of their hats next? What harshly lit corridors and dark, grimy alleyways are there left for them to explore? Well, Battery, for a start. The penultimate track on American Automatic opens with a drum fill that sounds live on first listen but can probably be safely assumed to be programmed (and we can also safely assume the ambiguity is deliberate, given the highly impressive attention to detail in KMC's sound design). Then there are crunchy, bright, distorted riffs that occasionally stray into the uncanny valley between synth and guitar, and hypnotic loops (of which there are quite a few instances on this album) distantly recalling the psychedelic, Krautrock-inspired walls of noise early industrial bands would embark on, especially in a live context. The beat is once again firmly, identifiably electro on this track.
Push closes the album on a noir jazz note that might sound faintly comical at the end of any other industrial album. But following the nine formidable displays of rhythmic muscle and electronic wizardry it almost feels like it's winking maliciously at the listener. You escaped the vortex of man-made horrors but the smirking carny knows you'll be back for more as soon as you get your breath back. I've never stopped coming back for more KMC, or maybe I never left in the first place. It's a morbidly compelling nightmare to be trapped in.
After the Crash
How do you follow up an album as complex and darkly alluring as American Automatic? With a farewell EP as straightforwardly bruising yet oddly groove-heavy as Of Fire, of course! Slug Song and Hit And Run feature the most effectively crushing use of bass guitar in industrial music since Test Dept or Neubauten, but with the attention to groove that made Charles Levi a master of the craft. Of Fire isn't as atmospheric as the album that preceded it, but it's certainly an impressively heavy and hard hitting bang to go out on.
If Metropolis Records had got their hands on Kill Memory Crash before Ghostly International did then American Automatic could have set the template for every mohawked, Doc Martensed, cargo-trousered bedroom producer in North America to try and rip off. They'd be touring with NIN and getting remixed by Rhys Fulber (whether they liked it or not). Meanwhile British promoters would probably carry on booking fucking Sheep on fucking Drugs for fear of scaring off their ageing, floor-length leather duster-clad punters with the threat of new and exciting talent, but such is life. At least being signed to Ghostly helped KMC cross paths with Legitimate Dance Music™ artists across the world, such as Franz & Shape and The Hacker.
Where are they now?
Adam, now operating under the name Circa Tapes, is still out there bringing seductive, slick and occasionally stern as fuck electronic sounds into the world. While writing this piece I also stumbled across some rather striking ambient music he's been recording for some years as Evoleta.
Alex, meanwhile, has returned to his roots as a techno DJ.
You know that thing where you look up what the members of your favourite defunct industrial bands are up to these days and it's always something shit and boring like writing wholesome folk songs for acoustic guitar (the worst kind of guitar) or making soundtracks for "video games" (since when did videos have games on them? Ridiculous) or playing 2nd accordion in Pigface or doing a podcast about how they used to play 2nd accordion in Pigface? Knowing that the former members of Kill Memory Crash are out there still working the machines, still keeping it electronic, still pushing the sonic envelope, gives me the exact opposite of that feeling of disappointment.
And now that there's no chance of their old band reforming, I can finally get this off my chest: "Kill Memory Crash" was always a naff name for such a cool and thrilling band.