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Front Line Assembly > Disorder
EP 1988 Wax Trax WAX 041 [US] / EP 1988 Third Mind TMLP24 [UK]
Release date: June 1988. Released on 12".
Tracklists:
Wax Trax WAX 041:
01. Obsession 04:07
02. Body Count 04:15
03. Die-Sect 04:38
04. The Wrack Part I 03:26
Third Mind TMLP 24:
01. Body Count 04:15
02. Obsession 04:07
03. Aggression 04:55
04. Lurid Sensation 04:05
05. Die-Sect 04:38
06. The Wrack 03:26
Side A of the Third Mind release (1-3) subtitled "Violence"
Side B subtitled "Oppression"
Credits on third Mind version:
Front Line Assembly Are Bill Leeb And Michael Balch. Contact 701 -1060 Barclay Street, Vancouver, B.C, Canads V6E 1 G6,. Cover By Eddie Stromboli. Special Thanks To Tom Ferris And Cal Stevenson
All tracks composed by Bill Leeb and Michael Balch. Tracks 1 and 3 engineered by David Ogilvie. Tracks 2, 4 and 6 mixed by David Ogilvie.
All tracks of this release were re-released on "Convergence" and "Corroded Disorder".
Review from Melody Maker, 28th May 1988
Front Line Assembly
Disorder
Third Mind Records
Another stray reverberation from modernism's "decommissioned planet", to borrow a phrase coined in these pages not long ago. A good one, as well, an apposite update on the decommissioned abbeys of gothic literature. For Front Line Assembly's Gregorian dance aesthetic is today's real "Goth" - forget the cowboys and Munsters who normally huddle under that tawdry moniker and be taken in by these metal constructions without function or object of homage, this pulsating machinery that produces nothing but a fixation upon it's own workings, this dance music for clubs that possibly couldn't exist, unless some nightclub owner were generous enough to agree to a scheme whereby nobody were allowed through the doors.
In fact, Canada's Front Line Assembly are in one sense far from "inhuman" - their titles, "Body Count", "Aggression", "The Wrack" are all suggestive of a preoccupation with a sinewy sense of the self, and this is a physical sound to which you could pump iron if you were of a mind to. But, especially by comparison with today's fleshy, over-humanised pop climate, with its over-active sweat glands and anti-plastic effusions (hi, Carol, hi, Tina!), Front Line Assembly take physicality to an obsessive concentrated extreme, not Cosmopolitan, no Options, but hitting a single spot, compulsively, like a needle in a sewing machine.
"Body Count", for example, builds up a metronomic assault on a certain point in your cranium, the intensity marked by what sounds like the periodic hiss of steam escaping from a piston, while a rolling keyboard motif like the system of escalators in an airport, denotes capacious dimensions. "Obsession" takes its cue from Cabaret Voltaire, but drowns out the echo by sheer metronomic overload.
"Agression" is typically Front Line - raucous swatches of synth, reminiscent of Faust, make up an enmeshed, giant awning over the dancefloor. A crude prototype for the Front Line sound would be a beatbox in a cathedral - a sonic architecture, a spatial awareness that's at odds with their brutal, metal hammer inversion.
Their are "voices" here - snatches, drones and chants, fragmented or indistinct utterances that emanate, ghostlike, from crevices or the piping system in a derelict building. These tattered remnants of vocals are more "inhuman" than mere instrumentals - they are like glimpses of human remains, evidence of what has been done to the narrative. If some kind of white dance attitude could be re-invoked at this late hour, after the zooty funksters of '81, or all that Sheffield stuff, then it must be this awesome, this compulsive but above all, this anonymous, all shadows and no scams.
In other words, anti-attitude. Forget the manifestoes, the warehouse DJ's turned pop stars of late, the Dave Dorrel-type entrepreneurs, the inept samplers. White dance's "future" belongs not to these chancers but to the solemn, machinic devastation of Front 242, Skinny Puppy and, not least, Front Line Assembly, music that's noisy, but silent as regards statements of intent.
David Stubbs
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