The darker realms of music have, for the last fifty years or so, been a place where digital dexterity and electronic creativity have held firm. Go back to those early days of gothic and industrial music, and you often find it was driven as much by the ones and zeros of the binary world as by the scathing and squalling guitars of the rock scene. And if you can’t see that darkwave and alternative dance music are often interchangeable names for the same form, then you have missed something pretty obvious.
I mention this to highlight the fact that, in crafting The Flesh Of The Innocent, Me The Machine’s coming together of the old school and the cutting edge, analog familiarity and digital forward thinking, is just the sound of a band following in a tradition half a century old.
I’m not at all saying that this sounds like the past, but it knows where it comes from, and that matters. If “The Flesh” opens the album with a unique blend of acoustic guitars and operatic vocals, within a minute, these are cocooned in big guitars and anthemic sonics, setting the scene for an eclectic and exciting album to come.
“Lightyears” is the sound of synth-pop and dark dance vibes pirouetting across the coolest clubland floor, infectious yet ornate, accessible and artistic, and “Soul Eater” plays with industrial electronica and glitchy inclusions before diving headfirst into an abrasive yet groove electro-rock.
Things end on the eclectic and energetic “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” presumably named for Wade Davis’s iconic book exploring Haitian cults and dripping with buoyant synths and, perhaps unexpectedly, but brilliantly executed, sax at its most seductive.
And this last track underlines the themes running through the album: the nature of evil and of alienation, transformation, and that point of collision where man and machine merge… something not just applicable to the dystopian backdrop being painted here, but increasingly poignant in the real world. But then such music, like good science fiction, is the perfect form through which to examine aspects of our own future, warnings to be heeded.
A concept album, if you like, with a genre-blurring through line that takes in rock, industrial, and metal, and, contrastingly, dance and cinematic electronic soundscaping, pop awareness, and the darkest and most delicious sounds.
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