Artist: The Machinist
Title: Towers
Type: EP
Label: Digital / Self Released 06/04/26
You know until I listened to this I hadn’t realised that for me at least there seemed to have been a dearth of good industrial death. Probably me listening in the wrong places, but whatever it meant that this blackened death/industrial machine caught me with a suckerpunch. I was sadly completely unaware of their existence or history (though I now gather one guitarist was once in melodic black metal band Argesk) so to say this was a pleasant surprise is an understatement. Three tracks, just under twenty five minutes to get acquainted.
Opener ‘Sagittarius In Bloom’ opens with a bludgeon of machine gun drumming, technical, sharp riffing and barked vocals. Modern, progressive tinged death metal to the core. Multi-layered vocals, synths echoing in the background, the song just stamping on before… it fades into a dark, ominous synth passage but glittering with light notes, stars maybe. But the technical death returns, batter at you relentlessly… and then the clean vocals, a rough chorus, rise and the music shifts into something far deeper, far more fascinating. The repeated lyrics, the feeling of howling souls. The use of differing vocals here, together, is fantastic. The time changes and tempo shifts, the discordant guitar leads. It is strange and furious and chaotic and it somehow utterly demolishes the impression that that this is blank face technical twiddling.
‘Of Creation And Cancer’, now your brain has been adjusted to the sound of The Machinist opens with jumping, jarring guitar and opens out into a bellowing vocal and the twisting, twisted guitar work and hammering drums. It is strange; biomechanical if you will. It feels so technical and yet as the weirdness rises in the keyboards and the song spasms to and fro its as though the animal inside is trying to escape. The machine can’t escape the cancer but the cancer might break free of the machine. Its a whirlwind of disorientation and utterly gripping despite tha. Like a rag doll flung around by the maniacal spinning of a turbine. And the quiet passage, full of weird cosmic distortion blossoms and explodes into something like the psychotic, cyborg cousin of Dodheimsgard around 666 International.
We close with the ten minute epic of ‘Cellular Catharsis’. Now this…this feels like the track the EP has been hurtling towards. High, epic melody spreads out as the death metal, the black metal faces turn over and over amidst riffing and fantastic drumming. Less tech-dancing chopped riffs, this is a full surge of dark, desperate emotion. Damn I wish I had the lyric sheet. There is something strangely, brutally imperious about this. This is controlled cosmic thunder, dimension sliding intelligence. Its slower moments pile the pressure on, the clean and death vocals tugging emotions in all directions from fear to hope. It is utterly mesmeric music; complex, powerful and and like bursting through the chaos of the previous two tracks to pierce the curtain and view the unknowable Metatron style. Tinges of prog flirting with old Rush, black metal veins clenching muscles and the somehow horrific death metal presence as thos vocals rise up from the flames and simly howl.
Oh yes, this is a good one indeed. So good. I’m going to have to go back and look at their previous work now, but regardless this monumental statement of blackened industrial death leaves one Hell of a shadow over us all.
Just excellent, excellent music.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 