I must confess that I’d never heard of Vancouver Industrial music before I encountered this from Germany’s Haujobb, but I had most certainly heard of and indeed own work by Front Line Assembly, who along with Skinny Puppy are, I now understand, are leading exponents of this movement. So gothic-electronic-industrial is what I expected “The Machine in the Ghost” to be. Although they’ve escaped my particular attention in spite of going for more than 30 years, Haujobb have released 9 albums, and various others under different aliases, not to mention an intriguing looking split with Wumpscut going back to 1996. So it looks like I have a lot of catching up to do.

My induction came in the form of “Uncanny Valley” – dark, electronic techno as I expected, full of shifting shapes and full of life in a discomforting sort of way. “Sinister mood music”, you might call it. My brain wasn’t leaking quite yet. “Dancing disturbance, yelling at silence” is the lyric – is this normal? Well no. If I said that “Uselessness” was stylistically an amalgam of Depeche Mode and Gary Numan, I’d be understating the issue. Strange industrial-style electronic noises encapsulate the dancing disturbance. I heard the sound of car trying to start with a flat battery. “I am the question, you are the answer” announces the vocalist mysteriously in his flat and sultry voice, continuing in first- and second person juxtaposition. The synthetic drum and electronic programme do their bit, raising the fear factor as they go along with sharp and menacing sounds firing in like daggers. “Under the Gun” seemed at first to be Haujobb’s answer to Kraftwerk’s “Numbers”. Here it’s the anticipated gothic-electronic-industrial style. The sweeping synthetic drum guides us through a bleak passage. At this point each piece has its own energy and intrigue, I find. Layer is superimposed upon layer of dark concept.

“Tomorrow” is bleak too, and takes on a nightmarish aspect in its repetition. “The Internation” has a dark and tinny electronic drone running through it. “We are the internation” is the repeated, unimaginative chorus. It pumps on mechanically. It certainly has a dark atmosphere about it and sounds fly around in their menacing way but it’s hardly the stuff of excitement. Now it’s like tuned down Clan of Xymox. As I listened to “Opposition” I reflected that whilst each piece was individually crafted in this industrial-electro style and featured a combination of electro-drone and experimental inputs to keep us thinking, it wasn’t as a whole amounting to much. It was becoming an exercise of going from one experience to the next without linkage other than the generic style. This is not what I had experienced when listening to Front Line Assembly. “Singularity” and “Mass” follow the same dreary and depressive pattern, blending into my brain without ringing any bells. Monotony is part of the package, and the ringing of a bell during “While It Rains” is the chosen way of providing this. The mood of this one came from underneath and round the sides, and finally there was something which piqued my senses. I felt a dramatic urban melancholy from the overall ambience and in particular from the trumpet. And here lies the key. I felt something. To this point I had listened but not felt.

I guess that “Machine in the Ghost” is interesting to a point but I’m not sure what the fuss is about. A devotee of this genre would undoubtedly see this differently. For me, the sounds and the ambience have a gothic identity but that’s not enough. The style was familiar to me, but with the exception of “While It Rains” this album didn’t break out into anything that excited me, frightened me or did anything else really.

(5/10 Andrew Doherty)

https://www.facebook.com/haujobbmusic

https://haujobb-ger.bandcamp.com/album/the-machine-in-the-ghost