Front Line Assembly
State Of Mind

The cover of this album doesn't promise anything good... but they did something good instead. Front Line Assembly hails from Canada and is considered among the "historic" industrial bands. Born from an idea by Bill Leeb, who had played with the early Skinny Puppy, another Canadian band of fundamental importance, they defined their program with the second LP release, this "State Of Mind." They toned down the harsher experiments present in the debut in favor of a more polished sound, but no less fierce for it.

The idea was to compose a mosaic of pieces that echoed the futuristic visions of Kraftwerk, updated to the emerging era of cyberpunk. What came out was a heavy work, with typically industrial rhythms, cacophonous and dissonant, rich in pneumatic perforations, brushed with electronic effects that were almost ambient in the distance.
A voice filtered to extremes, as was the fashion, obsessive and oppressive, metallic and expressionless, brought these technological pantomimes to life.

12 tracks very similar to each other, so much so that the album can feel a bit monotonous in the long run, but it should be considered that this is fundamentally an alien-metropolitan concept, which must be absorbed in one go. Its goal was to disturb, with its morbid and slightly perverse spirit that has always characterized the industrial scene, to provide a sick picture of a civilization shaken by deformed mechanical monsters, by crazed machines, by devastating seismic shocks.

Considering that it is an album from 1988, the result is more than good, even though there are sporadic traces of naivety. Two tracks can be taken as a model to describe their "music." The slightly techno beat that shakes the opening "First Reprisal" is their statement of intent, with disturbed offstage voices and treadmill-like cadences. "Sustain Upright" is instead among the less "heavy" pieces of the batch, a slowed-down danceable track that moves between nebulas of ambient electronics in the background, yet it always retains that anguishing spirit that permeates the entire album, that end-of-the-world feeling that leads to a psychotic and paranoid "state of mind."
One cannot scream "masterpiece," but one can certainly affirm that we are in the presence of an excellent result, which will have its say in the development of the upcoming industrial scene.