Why all the hate?

OK so in an earlier post, I described what I believed to be the most overrated artifacts of industrial music, albums or artists which have received love and adoration that I feel they do not at all deserve. Now I’m going to take the opposite tack: defend those that have been unfairly attacked. Those unfortunate souls who have unwittingly invoked the wrath of enough industrial scenesters to bring down torrents of unjustified abuse.

Front Line Assembly: Implode
This album came out in 1999, and underwhelmed a lot of people. The miserable hacks on rec.music.industrial were particularly savaging in their appraisal of it. I’m not entirely sure why; its’ certainly not one of FLA’s best works, but it’s far from the worst (Civilization takes that prize in my books), and has a couple of great tracks, such as Synthetic Forms. I think the reason this album put people offside was that it signalled the shift of FLA’s sound away from their guitar-heavy days of Millenium and Hardwired (which they of course received lots of criticism for), towards their highly-produced electronic sound that dominated their next few albums (which they also received criticism for, from the same people who criticised leaving their earlier electronic sound for guitars). I guess sometimes you just can’t win, huh.

Decoded Feedback
This band has been a perennial favourite for bashing on rec.music.industrial and other forums. And I’ll admit they’re not the greatest or most original band in the world; they play fairly bog-standard 90s EBM, with the occasional splash of guitars or trance-influenced beats. But they’ve got some perfectly decent songs, and their album Combustion from a few years ago actually had some real smashers. They won’t go down in the annals of all-time industrial greats, but they really don’t deserve all the hate they’ve received.

Velvet Acid Christ
Ahh good old Velvet Acid Christ. Probably no band in the history of industrial music has attracted more criticism. The man behind the project, Bryan Erickson, certainly hasn’t helped his cause any. Bryan has jumped into every shitfight and flamewar concerning VAC, bit at every morsel of trollbait dangled before him, and argued himself into more corners than I can care to remember. He’s put huge numbers of people offside with his aggressive rants about animal rights, politics, or whatever crusade he’s currently obsessed with. And like all good internet villains, every year or so he declares he’s 'finished with all you losers' and deletes his blog or newsgroup account or whatever his most recent method of getting flamed was, and then a few months later he emerges from the swamps and the whole process begins again. But what about the music?
Velvet Acid Christ is actually really kickarse stuff. I know saying this will instantly reduce my 'industrial scene cred' to zero, or negative, or whatever, but I don’t care, I like it. OK so he had some crap releases like Hex Angel, and Church of Acid has some of the worst overuses of sampling in industrial music, but there is some real classic stuff there. I recently dusted off my copy of Calling ov the Dead, and it still stands as an absolute cracker of an album, and made a huge impact on me when I first heard it. Twisted Thought Generator also goes in that basket, and was one of my favourite EBM albums for a while. Neuralblastoma had some genuinely creepy and powerful tracks on it, even if the second half is mainly filler. But the recent album Lust for Blood is the best thing he’s ever done; almost every track on it is fantastic, from the Pornography-era Cure influenced Crushed to the amazing retro-futuristic synths of Ghost in the Circuit and Ghost Regen.

Velvet Acid Christ is one of the classic examples of why you should always separate the music from the person; Bryan is a deranged, judgemental dick, but writes some really good music, which should b e judged on its own merit, and with some rare exceptions, it rocks.