We live in harsh times, and harsh times demand harsh tunes. It’s therefore not particularly shocking that industrial music is moving in even darker directions and incorporating other genres, such as darkwave, into the fold.
Compare the caustic Castration Anxiety from HIDE, the minimalistic desolation of Shadow World by Lana Del Rabies, and the textured noise of Sister Iodine’s Venom, and it is obvious this ain’t your daddy’s dancefloor.
Metal musicians have taken notice. The Body embraced power electronics even before collaborating with Uniform, whose The Long Walk merges industrial music with ’80s hardcore, and Beastland by Author & Punisher is a drone-metal album for Goth clubs. This explains why Scott Kelly of Neurosis and Sanford Parker, the producer and engineer who also spent time in black metal supergroup Twilight and epic sludge purveyors Buried at Sea, would be mutually attracted to making electronica as cathartic as possible.
The self-titled 2016 debut from Mirrors for Psychic Warfare, the project they created, seems a little ahead of its time. This makes it feel like the timing for the follow-up I See What I Became (Neurot Recordings) is perfect.
A noirish, sinister vibe slithers beneath all eight tracks on the album. Sparse, Godflesh-inspired austerity is the canvas with flourishes atop that paint a bleak, opaque picture. This manifests itself in the sneaky synth patterns and creaky samples, as well as Kelly’s hypnotizing nearly whispered vocals. It sounds like despair, but by the time he is intoning, “I need your heart to pump my blood” on album closer, “Coward Heat,” it seems as if he has resigned to his fate and looks for light in the darkness. The transition is as subtle as it is profound.
