And it begins. Keyboard waves lapping as a tide as the regimented, classic industrial drum sound kicks in. The riff matches it pounding for pounding with the template that’s been with us since Demanufacture. The death vocals rise and Of Concrete And Ash Age is with us. It’s tight, it’s very competent. Mid paced with all the classic touches of the genre. The problem is that over use of that precise template has dulled the razor edges to the point where it slides over into next track Rotted Society with scarcely a bump and neither has enough individual colour to hold my attention and I just hear one sound. Toxic Secretion Of Being is perhaps a little more death in the metal. Nice guitar break, sure and obviously the band can play. It’s just what they offer here that I can’t get past.
I was there on the front row when metal grabbed and embraced industrial, enthusiastic and hearing something I loved and wanted to see grow. It seemed a great vehicle for expressing alienation from the capitalist industrial society and it’s polluting, homogenising ways. Now I appear to have drifted to the back of the audience as it has become an immovable factory building itself and Industry seems part of that I’m afraid.
The title track and closing song on this EP The External Paradise Of The Illusion, separated by a short instrumental do not deviate. The sounds stick to the line and pass by polished and bright, hard and heavy but still just slide through my hands. I genuinely can find no handle, no imperfection to get a grip on. It really saddens me because, hell, I want to like this. It is, for me, sterile, but in a way that pushes me away rather than expresses something with that sterility. In the end, I find the songs just OK but… Well, featureless.
Some forms off music just have added pitfalls, maybe. Certainly at the moment industrial death metal appears to have them unless you throw safety into the dumpster and go weird. Sadly for me Hyperial haven’t and instead they mis-stepped into one such pit and as a result Industry is all just too generic and nothing hooks me, no riff or melody. If you’re a total industrial rivet head by all means do have a listen because Hyperial are a competant unit and have had the guts to do this EP as a self release and that deserves to be respected. It is very much rigidly Industrial Death Metal too, for good or ill. Me, I just can’t find the songs to inspire me. Sorry but I’ll pass.
(4/10 Gizmo)
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