Marilyn Manson has charted an amazing, unusual, and controversial path as an artist and musician, but he is one of the most vital commentators on culture in the last 30 years. His rise was met with a mixture of admiration and scorn as he presented original but somehow summative industrial sounds that captured a much …
Night Club is one of the most exciting and interesting of smaller industrial projects, a dark fusion of dreamy sounds with bright electronic edges and frenetic beats. Composed of Emily Kavanaugh and Mark Brooks, the duo make infectiously catchy industrial songs that sound like a dark funeral for pop music. It’s as though the catchy …
His Master’s Voice is a provocative science fiction film from Turkey that places the genre in a much more intellectual setting than is the norm. It is based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem, as was Andrei Tarkovsky’s important classic film, Solaris. Like the film from Tarkovsky, this work asks far deeper questions than does …
Blaqk Audio is a standout EBM and industrial band with deep electronic roots that explore 1980’s sounds better than just about any other project in the genre. That is something of a surprise, because it’s a spinoff and side project from the notable hard rock band AFI, which veers between metal, punk, and new wave …
Some remarks from George Takei at Denver Pop Culture Con prompted me to revisit the classic film, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The film came out in 1991 at the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had just been dismantled in the very same year, and the writers built an allegory that …
Combichrist has been making industrial music since Andy LaPlegua started working as a solo electronic artist with the very experimental The Joy of Gunz. The second album, Everybody Hates You, is a landmark for the genre and has some of the most memorable electronic songs ever created. The same can be said of Icon of …
MXMS is an underground two person band that is one of the best artistic expressions in music. Dark, haunting, depressed, and gothic, they call their sound funeral pop. It stands out as deeply poetic and undefinable, with Ariel’s low and smoothly ravishing voice stretching over Jeremy Dawson’s keys played usually in the style of dark …
The 69 Eyes are one the best goth bands to ever grace music. They are the only great goth rock band besides the classics of Bauhaus, The Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. That is a large role to fill and an amazing accomplishment. Coming from Finland, the band has managed to be very unique …
IAMX is one of the greatest industrial projects of all time. Chris Corner has taken his internal feelings and introspections about depression and a broken world and turned them into an expressive art form that is almost like painting with electronic sounds. His lyrics complement odd sonic landscapes in a way that is at once …
Bullet Height’s dark and moody debut album, No Atonement, is one of the most exciting albums in the industrial and synth rock art world. With sounds that stretch back to the 80’s and modern electro-pop influences, the album emerges as a dark industrial vision of relationships and society filtered through epic synths and goth vibes …