Front Line Assembly
Improvised Electronic Device

Released somewhat quietly compared to previous albums, the fifteenth official studio title by Canada's Front Line Assembly seems to want to celebrate their twenty-five years of activity by showcasing the best of their aggressiveness and sonic style. Leaving many fans puzzled, the band of Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber doesn't wink at the dominant trend of the electronic scene and decisively delves into a reinterpretation of EBM and technological hard-core in a blatant manner, directing the listener towards unsettling horizons like never before and rhythmic simulations of hallucinatory frenzies.

Beyond the song titles - always aimed at describing specific situations and iconographies - the dominant mood of the entire album revolves like a whirling dervish around the distorted and filtered voice and the strategically analog-digital basslines, with an infusion of wicked arrangements ranging from distorted guitars to delirious drum-machine rolls; while granting (very little) ground to incursive keyboards that veil the final parts of many tracks with an evocative dark melancholy.

Except for the hyper-digital slow of "Afterlife," which channels the best of the last-decade Depeche Mode, the other 11 tracks pierce the eardrums with a triumph of demonic vocals and synthetic counterpoints right from the start of the album. The opening track "I.E.D." hammers out Young Gods-style riffs with techno-epic sauce and materializes anxious visions of a future already at the door, eventually sublimating into the poignant notes of "Angriff" that unfold the universe of pain and illusion to which FLA had partially accustomed us with the previous "Artificial Soldiers" from 2007.

And so it goes... an often unstoppable gallop through a printed circuit of immense proportions that shows us the darkest side of technology and its deviations. Without adding anything substantially new on the research front, but certainly demonstrating that craftsmanship still makes a difference and that today it's an adrenaline-fueled sound tinged with science fiction representing the last bastion of consciousness of a humanity dedicated to addiction and conformity.

I give a solid 4 because this "I.E.D." is a massive album that prepares you for the worst moments of the day and makes you fierce.