Since I'm plugging books, I may as well plug some music

I'm always looking for Industrial (aka Electro, aka EBM, aka etc.) music that doesn't suck. A few weeks ago, I decided to check out some Wumpscut. I'd heard a few Wumpscut tracks, it's hard not to when you're a fan of these genres, but it never really made an impression. I downloaded Wreath of Barbs and Fuckit from Amazon.

Wumpscut doesn't tour or play live shows, it's one guy churning out a studio album a year, plus singles, remixes, etc. Both albums have some good songs, but a lot of the material is just kind of blah - perhaps even underdeveloped. Fuckit is also mastered super loud; I'm willing to bet that if I plugged it into Logic and measured it with the multimeter plug in, the RMS would be -6dbs. I could try to explain why that's bad, but just google "Loudness Wars," and you'll find articles with nice graphs and charts demonstrating why -6dbs is ridiculous.

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Saturday night I was drinking, surfing the internet and listening to music when I decided that I felt like checking out some music I haven't heard before. I've had pretty good luck discovering new bands via the various remix albums I own. I think I only really buy remix albums of Haujobb and Seabound, but so far, so good - so whatever. I was listening to tracks from Seabound's When Black Meets Blue and decided to check out Die Form. I'd heard the name of the band before, but couldn't place the music. Turns out they've been around since 1979 and have been very active and releasing an album every year or two for more than a decade.

It's kind of weird - which is saying a lot for this genre! Very electronic, with pleasantly abrasive squelches and squeaks, and repeating sequenced EBM bass synth sounds (reminds me of old D.A.F. tracks), with a female soprano singing in a very Classical/operatic style. I would have hated it for that last point when I was 18. It took me a long time to get used to operatic singing in college. Once you listen to enough opera, however, it doesn't come off as obnoxious as it does when you are uninitiated (your mileage my vary).

I decided to go with their Best of XXX and Noir Magnetique albums. Both CDs are super expensive (the "Best of" is over $90!!!), but the mp3 albums are the same price as anything else. I have to wonder, are downloads more profitable than CDs at this point? No cost of plastic, I figure that might help - maybe not. All I know is that I'm much more likely to impulsively download albums than mail order the actual CDs; cost is a factor, but so is instant gratification. On the other hand, I'm also the 1% of the population that actually pays for what I download instead of using torrents and shit like that. I love music, and I love albums instead of just single tracks. In fact, it doesn't matter if someone wrote the best single song in the world ever, if the rest of the songs suck and the album overall sucks, then the band sucks.

Besides, I already have hundreds of CDs and their cases cluttering up my living space. I actually like not having physical trinkets for every fucking thing.

Anyways - overall I like both Die Form albums a lot, but I fully understand if the operatic soprano turns people off. Definitely worth listening to the free samples on their myspace page; start with "Bite of God" if you're not sure you'll like the soprano singing, then expand from there.