Psyclon Nine – And Then Oblivion (Metropolis) – It would be very easy (and indeed rather lazy) to think you might have LA’s Psyclon Nine nailed after the almost violent attack(s) that come hot on the high heels of the opening tracks of their latest album (their ninth?). This is a lot more that just that mere (modern) melding of elements of Industrial Rock, Metal, Deathcore, Dark Ambient and Trap that so many of those goth flavoured industrial things can be these days (there’s a reason why we were covering and indeed releasing and putting on far more industrial music back in the 90s than we do now). And Then Oblivion is an album that stands out from the dark cloud of bands that so often all fuse together in one big dark purple and even darker red ball of blackness, there’s something a little more here and yes we can go with the claim that it “sees the cult US act further cement their status as lords of the Blackened Industrial scene”. We need bands that want to push their own boundaries.

There’s some delicious drama here, indeed an “individualistic strand of heavy electro-metal achieved via a combination of juddering guitars, sheet metal percussion and thoroughly unholy electronics”. This is indeed a global noise attack, a moody, sometimes smouldering, sometimes violent machine driven experience; intense, darkly colourful as those dark vocals are hissed out in an almost otherworldly snake-ish way and as you think you have it worked out then Apres Toi Le Deluge and the beautiful calm after the storm or maybe the fragile almost-silence found in the aftermath of the flood of it all. The drama of this album is why it works so well, the build up and the come down over the length of the whole thing, those bites that are right where they need to be. It really does crank when it needs to (and it does need to, there isn’t really anywhere else to logically take it other than to crank it right up in the middle of the whole thing), it is laced with the right ingredients and well yes, it is modern industrial goth music, there are no great musical revolutions, you’re not going listen to this and think you’ve never heard anything like it before. This is an album you need to listen to as a whole, one off tracks and video bites won’t tell you why it works so well; you need to take on the whole thing in one go to know why Taxidermy is just the right way to end it…    

The album is out now, find the album via Bandcamp and updates via Facebook

Psyclon Nine are back in the UK tour with our old friends Genitorturers, although we haven’t encountered Gen and her band since that time and that rather interesting interview conducted in a room in the Holiday Inn over in North London somewhere back in the last century. The tour dates are further down the page…

It does rather sounds like things have moved on with Genitorturers since those first two albums, things sound like they might have got a touch more metallic, dare we say a touch more shock rock, bigger? A little bit more glossy? A little less raw and punky, they were so dangerously raw back there at the start. Actually it looks like they’ve only jsut come back with Scars And Stripes after a quiet year or two. The dates are down there…

And as we said, Cyclon Nine will return to Europe in September as special guests of Genitorturers, playing nine UK shows before heading to Belgium, Austria and Germany. Confirmed dates are as follows:

4th September  NEWCASTLE Anarchy Brew
5th September  GLASGOW Cathouse
6th September  BLACKPOOL Bootleg Social
7th September  MANCHESTER Rebellion
9th September  BIRMINGHAM Castle And Falcon
10th September  BRISTOL Fleece
11th September  BRIGHTON Chalk
12th September  LONDON Islington O2 Academy
13th September  SOUTHAMPTON 1865
14th September  DIEST (BE) Club Hell
17th September  VIENNA (AT) Viper Room
21st September  FRANKFURT (DE) Nachtlebenl