Techno Animal - The Brotherhood Of The Bomb

  by David McNamee

published: 11 / 2 / 2002

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Review

'Brotherhood Of The Bomb' lays its intent out flat in track number 01, ‘Cruise Mode 101’, the most jaw-dropping opener heard on an album since V/VM’s 'Sick Love'. Just the act of describing it seems exhausting (not to mention tantamount to nothing), but the sound of it involves some damn ferocious MCing from Company Flow (we think that’s who it is, but to be honest the volcano of brain-melting analogue erupting around their retaliative rhyming drowns everything but their most reactionary proclamations) while flaming jet fuel is being hurled into a hurricane raging around them. Company Flow are joined by Vast, Rubberoom, dalek, Toastie Taylor and Sonic Sum; all rock solid in the eye of a hurricane that is whipping houses and inside-out cows at their heads. And they’re just the guests. Kevin Martin and Justin Broadrick, of industrial savant-garde heroes Godflesh, are the Techno Animal of the title. A snarling, primitive beast; a mechazoid chimera several Empire States Building’s tall with skyscrapers for fingers and big scary lazer red eyes. Is that what it’s gonna take for the US to sort out its foreign policy? Is that what it’s going to take to quell the conflicts in Northern Ireland? Is that what it’s going to take to expel acts of genocide in the Middle East? End racism, end injustice, make a happy world for fluffy bunnies and guinea pigs ? Is that what it’s gonna take; A BIG METAL MONSTER WITH RADIOACTIVE INDUSTRIAL SLURRY BREATH FARTING THE WORLD INTO OBLIVION?? Martin and Broadrick, perched in their little silver-man zoid seats, seem to think so. They’ve formulated Techno Animal as an avenging angel, a techno terrorist, a hip hop CNN; only this time it’s Godzilla that’s rapping, not Chuck D. This is a record that screams. THE APOCALYPSE IS HERE NOW IN THE SLUMS OF SAO PAULO, THE GHETTOS OF QUEENS, IN THE MOST LONELY EMPTY STREETS OF LONDON, PARIS, MUNICH. It is a record with songs called cool things like ‘Robosapien’, ‘Sub Species’, ‘We Can Build You’, ‘Blood Money’, and ‘Hell’, all of which creep up behind the bloated fatuous pig of oppressive capitalist hegemony and whisper: “Time to die.” Musically it sounds like the constant brain-bleeding migraine Alec Empire experiences every second of his life and yet remains utterly incapable of transcribing onto record. Musically it sounds like a long, extended analogue-synthesised fart. Whatever you do don’t listen to it on headphones. You’ll be forever casting suspicious glances over your shoulder, most likely expecting the street to rise up from behind you, or tower blocks to come crashing down on your feeble mortal body. 'Brotherhood of The Bomb' is a record crammed with paranoiac epiphanies. It was most likely constructed in a hermetically-sealed nuclear bunker, the only outlet to the outside world a 24hour connection to www.conspiracytheory.com Techno Animal are probably not men who should be allowed to roam the community any time soon, but their power as a destructive force is undeniable. They’ll tear you a new soul.

Track Listing:-

1 Cruise Mode 101
2 Glass Prism Enclosure
3 Hypertension
4 DC-10
5 Robosapien
6 Freefall
7 Monoscopic
8 Piranha
9 Sub Species
10 We Can Build You
11 Blood Money
12 Hell

Label Links:-

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