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Although the two singles I have encountered from The Silence Industry —“Headlong (General Strike)” and “The Crawling Eye”—not only caught my attention but effortlessly piqued my interest, there is nothing like a full album, a long-playing record, as we used to call them, to really experience and understand a band. With that additional room, a band is better able to explore numerous sonic ideas and more able to express themselves fully; an album is always the way forward.
And what an album the wonderfully self-deprecatingly titled “The Lamest Cyberpunk Dystopia You Could Imagine” proves to be. It is a brilliant blend of dark and delicious digital design and ornate analog, post-punk creativity and gothic shade, alt-rock energies, and darkwave soundscaping.
Starting with the majestic “As The Walls Close In,” this long, but not untypically so, piece sets us up nicely, a perfect signpost for TSI’s direction of travel, signposting a path that runs neatly between the more artful and inventive fringes of the gothic world and the anthemic electronica that the likes of Depeche Mode took to it’s apocalyptic logical conclusion.
“Forward and/or Dust” has the martial groove of Killing Joke. “Echoed In The Sounds of Violence” sounds like the sort of thing that Bach might have got up to if he had not found his break as an 18th-century kapellmeister but had instead learned his trade in a 90s electro-goth band. The beats and brooding atmospheres of “We Are Banging On The Gates of Hell” perfectly chime with the title.
Singles are great; they are often short, sharp, and shockingly instantaneous ways of grabbing the listener’s attention. But albums, especially when made this well, are more than the sum of those individual parts, allowing for an overall mood or vibe, atmosphere, and anticipation to settle over the music in a way that you only notice when you journey the whole way through from start to finish.
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