Dirty

Aborym have been consistently delivering the goods for a surprisingly long time now, haven’t they? It only really struck me when coming to write this review, that it was 2001 when I first had my introduction to the band with their 2nd album ‘Fire Walk With Us’, and even then they’d been around in one form or another since 1992. Needless to say, I instantly found ‘Fire Walk With Us’ to be manna from heaven, and the band quickly found a place close to my heart alongside the likes of Red Harvest, Blut Aus Nord and the amazing Mysticum as sonic extremists who effortlessly infused industrial soundscapes, crazed rhythms and twisted melodies galore.

Fast forward to 2013, and we still see Aborym living up to their history, but persistently looking to the future for concepts for their art. ‘Dirty’ is a double album, the first part of which is what I will be concentrating on here (the second disc features a couple of re-recorded classics, as well as some surprising covers from the likes of Pink Floyd, NIN and Iron Maiden – with Maiden’s ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’ getting the full Aborym treatment, keeping surprisingly close to the original, albeit with huge swathes of keyboards covering the majority of the guitar melodies and scathing vocals which will naturally make the purists poo in their pantaloons – it’s on the bands facebook page for those whose interest is piqued!).

However, it’s the new material that shows Aborym as we know them best; bathed in a crusty dystopian industrial landscape made up of all that is wrong with the modern world. The sparse cover artwork featuring nothing more than an inverted grimy inner city on a piss-yellow background gives nothing away as to what bubbles under the surface of the album. If you ever heard ‘Urfe’ by The Axis of Perdition, and yearned for it to actually have had more ‘music’ as opposed to pretty much being a spoken word piece of atmospheric horror fiction, Aborym are here to make your bad dreams come true. Buzzing static, electrical hum and white noise one moment, and screams, panicked riffage and maniacal blast beats the next (still provided by Bard ‘Faust’ Eithun, rather than a drum machine to give that human touch), the album’s title track ‘Dirty’ captures the spirit of old Aborym with huge amounts of electronic beats engaging and melding with the sickened guitars as they spark and stutter out slivers of riffs like Cyberdine’s Skynet happily spitting forth nukes to wipe out humanity.

The boys wander into fresh exciting soundscapes which their last album ‘Psychogrotesque’ often showcased – with ‘Helter Skelter Youth’ showing a slower, mind-fucking, groove encrusted technological enhancement which fits effortlessly into the band’s sound. But the main body of the album is still made up of manic beats and jarring guitar work which is summed up in the album opener ‘Irreversible Crisis’, and even when the vocals surprisingly sound almost falsetto Maryiln Manson-like towards the end of the track, everything you hear is still undeniably Aborym in essence; mechanical, unforgivingly sterile yet strangely re-assuring. Album closer ‘The Day The Sun Stopped Shining’ features a fast paced tremolo picked riff which has impressive atmosphere thanks to the synth arrangements which back it, flickering electronics and an almost theremin like keyboard melody offsetting the closing moments of soft, downbeat piano work which sees the album out.

As a whole, the album is entrenched in moral rot, corruption and most importantly degradation – you don’t have a track called ‘Raped by Daddy’ and not feel enveloped by these things. But it’s these things that serve as the power source on which Aborym thrives, the acrid battery which provides the life blood on which their steely skies and grey industrialist landscapes blossom. I don’t feel depressed after listening to this album, I feel strangely uplifted and invigorated by it – but I’m sure each individual will take something different from ‘Dirty’, there’s a lot of scope for it in the material to say the least. One thing which does seem abundantly clear is that Aborym continue to unsettle and challenge – and long may they continue to do so!

Originally written for www.avenoctum.com

It’s not a return to the approach Aborym used on Kali Yuga Bizarre, but Dirty might be the strongest record they’ve released since then. While Generator was an overall loss for me in the long run, and I skipped over Psychogrotesque entirely due to disappointing samples, this album seems to reinvigorate the band’s sound with a fresh aesthetic and improved integration of metal and electronic music techniques. On the other hand, the songwriting suffers from many of the same flaws that previous albums did; more on that later.

Shockingly, Dirty is… well… dirty. The guitars sound much filthier than they did on previous efforts, with less crunch and fewer chugs if any, and the overall mix is much less treble heavy than it was in the past. This results in an overall muddier sound, although the electronics generally come through well. Dirty also (ironically) has substantially more clean singing than its predecessors, which helps vary up the sound. The electronic side of things sees the most improvement from earlier works, primarily by drifting further from the symphonic undertones of previous albums (or overtones in the case of Kali Yuga Bizarre) into more synthetic forms. The aesthetic remains a few years behind trends – for instance there are no dubstep elements as far as I can tell. Fans of that may have to wait a few years to see Aborym’s take on that, assuming they ever experiment with it at all.

Oddly enough, Aborym’s songwriting on this album reminds me more of the ‘accessible’ side of industrial metal – see an album like Demanufacture by Fear Factory for an example. Either way, there are some obvious Nine Inch Nails references here – the bonus disc of the deluxe edition even includes a cover of “Hurt” from The Downward Spiral. The lyrics also take a similar vaguely personal turn at times (although they’re best described as mostly sex and societal decay), although comparing lyrical themes is a tenuously useful tool at best. Perhaps the major cause of this is the general deemphasis of metallic elements in the mix; while the compositional style is nonlinear and riff based, the aforementioned production changes play a major role in making more accessible elements stand out. There’s also a lot of repetition – sometimes a song dwells on an idea for over a minute, which usually feels like padding. Given that Dirty is only 49 minutes long, that’s a bad thing.

I don’t know how long my affectation for this work is going to last, but I do think actual improvements have been made from previous albums. It’s not entirely aesthetics – there’s a better sense of flow to the songs than before, although the coherence of the song structures still leaves somewhat to be desired. Either way, regardless of whether you like or dislike it, Dirty at least points the way forwards for Aborym – another album like this or better, and I might call it a full fledged revival.

Highlights: “Dirty”, “Bleedthrough”, “Helter Skelter Youth”

Originally written for invisiblesandwichtm.wordpress.com

Running parallel to an extent with Norway’s Dodheimsgard, Italy’s Aborym began as a fairly unassuming second-wave black metal band before taking on a more experimental and avant-garde approach. Although they might be best known for Mayhem and Tormentor vocalist Atila Csihar’s tenure with the band, Aborym have adopted a pretty interesting and unique stance in the black metal realm at large. Industrial black metal has long been Aborym’s calling, and unlike other bands who have dared to marry the two genres, Aborym have taken great care to blend the two with care and consideration. Aborym’s sixth album, “Dirty”, is appropriately named; it is decadent, hedonistic, and rotten to the core. The style has potential, and much of Aborym’s material here is enjoyable on a surface level, but with the band’s obsessive determination to forge a dense and distinctly industrial style, the songwriting and execution come up short. There is potential here, but it may have sounded better on paper.

If there’s one thing Aborym has excelled in with “Dirty”, it’s the way they’ve seamlessly blended industrial and EDM music with black metal. As far as my own listening history and taste is concerned, this fusion of styles has assumed a form in bands like Blut Aus Nord and The Axis of Perdition, bands that, while making ample use of industrial music’s timbre and cold aesthetic, scarcely translated into music that might appeal to industrial music fans. Instead, it was almost always black metal itself that was highlighted, and even then, the genre’s elements would be often contorted with jarring experimentation and additional influence from other styles. By contrast, Aborym’s style bridges the black metal and industrial styles with greater equality and due reverence paid to the latter. Although it’s still right to file Aborym first under ‘metal’, “Dirty” integrates their industrial influences so deeply that the metal elements are forced to play a democratic role, often cautiously navigating around the electronic noise. The songwriting also presents a major departure from the black metal standard- many of the tracks here are driven by upbeat rhythms, some to the point of even being considered ‘danceable’. Although Aborym recall plenty of black metal conventions in tandem with this industrial element, the style on “Dirty” reminds me a lot more of Marilyn Manson than Blut Aus Nord. It’s admittedly not a style or sound I have found myself inclined towards before or after hearing this album, but it’s at least refreshing to hear a fusion of genres unfold in a manner I’m not wholly familiar with.

Thankfully when it comes to their noise and electronic ingredients, Aborym are plenty inventive. In particular, “Across the Universe” makes excellent use of the style, cranking up a surprisingly catchy set of electronic ideas along with the expected assortment of riffs. “The Day the Sun Stopped Shining” is another highlight, giving listeners a taste of a slightly more reserved and melodic sound before the album closes. Aborym’s industrial element enjoys a much-welcome presence in the mix, with the synthesizers packing just as much of a sonic punch as the guitars and drums. Unfortunately, as successful and refined as Aborym have made this stylistic fusion, they have failed to keep things interesting on the home front, that being the metal itself. It’s as if Aborym got too caught up in perfecting their industrial craft that they forgot to pay attention to the other half. Although there are plenty of electronic sections that linger in the listener’s mind after the album finishes, I don’t think there’s a single guitar riff on the album that dares to be unique or memorable. If the riffs aren’t blandly recalling the done-to-death tremolo picking tricks and bland chord arrangements of black metal long-past, the riffs often default on uninventive chugging and rhythmic accompaniment. To compound the problem, the ‘dirty’ production pays no consideration to the guitars, which are left sounding sterile and samey. Add some lukewarm vocals to the melting pot, and “Dirty” is left an album that seems to have put all of its good eggs in one mechanical, synthesized basket.

Although Aborym have found an interesting style with potential aplenty to excite and disturb, “Dirty” ultimately comes off as a fairly mediocre collection of songs with far more flash than thunder.“Across the Universe” stands out a head above for its dark atmosphere and superb electronics, but for the rest of the album, I’m typically left bored and underwhelmed.

This is the lowest rating I've ever given to an Aborym album, but this is the highest score I can, within reason, give to Dirty, Aborym's 6th full length album and 2nd album with their current lineup. This above average; don't get me wrong, this is definitely takes a few listens to appreciate, but it's good, in a way. I suspect, with the title of the album and all the connotative implications it holds, that the intent of this album is to establish a sense of uncomfortable intimacy. Plainly put, the lyrics are highly sexual in nature in some of the songs. This extends to the music, which is by turns dissonant, repetitive, and mournfully melodic, as if grieving over the loss of something pure. The melodies have fascimiles of happier times, but those are quickly revealed to be mirages or hallucinations.

Based on most of the paragraph above, you may ask why I rated this lower than any other aborym album. It's really hard to pin down, but as much as I like Hell:IO:Kabbalus/Paolo Pieri's contributions, he has enormous shoes to fill. Compared with the outpouring of riffs on Aborym's first three albums, of which With No Human Intervention had the most it seemed to me, as well as the two that followed (which I still regard as quite exemplary in their own right), Dirty's riffs seem so... sparse. Towards the end of Dirty they start coming back again, so I know at least at some level Pieri can come up with new riffs, but too much of the time the songs seem to consist of synths that simply blare a repetitive melody, with the guitars doing nothing of importance at all, and the trademark of Aborym that defined them was the fusion of black metal/blackened metal riffs with occasional electronics. I don't mind electronics (I love them when they're used right) but here the riffs take a clear backseat, and really, I hate it when ANYTHING takes a back seat. If you got a guitarist, USE HIM. Just because the synths are now of more importance does not mean that the guitars have to necessarily be less. Barre chords in much of the earlier songs holds them back from fulfilling their potential, which led me to skip several tracks, something I almost never do with Aborym. Another reviewer for another album used the phrase "undetonated warhead" and that's an apt description here.

That is to say, there is a lot of potential in Dirty, but Fabban and co. seem to get bogged down by the trivial, mundane shit (e.g. style) a few times on this album, which hinders the overall thematic development of the album (substance). One example of this is riff recycling. I hate it when it happens (we all occasionally do it). But beginning two albums in a row with what is essentially THE SAME RIFF it cheapens the experience. Aborym do have moments of poignancy -- true to the intent of the "uncomfortable intimacy" that I mentioned earlier. These come, and when they do, it can be summed up with the image I had in my head: a rose wilting. The theme of "innocence lost" is prevalent here, with bittersweet melodies in songs like "Raped by Daddy" (subtlety is apparently not the game here), "Factory of Death", and the closer "The Day The Sun Stopped Shining" which are good examples of this. "The Day The Sun Stopped Shining" is a real good example of this. The ending is surprisingly heartfelt and could easily have been from a movie soundtrack of some sort. Moments like this are what bring Dirty its greatest triumphs, which are when the moments of "uncomfortable intimacy" I mentioned earlier shine and strike a nerve with me, the listener.

However, a couple great songs and a wonderful ending do not make for a full length album, and even counting the second disc, (which seems tacked-on, last minute, and unnecessary), and this affects my perception greatly. The Iron Maiden cover was a complete butchery, where the melody and feel of the original is lost in a sea of showboating and blaring rave melodies. Aborym have done shit like this better in the past, cuz this is just disrespectful to Iron Maiden. As for the Pink Floyd cover, I can simply only say that Aborym have no business in the Pink Floyd game. The cover of Nine Inch Nails was appropriate, but I ain't a particular NIN fan, so NEXT! The re-records simply proved what I had suspected all along, however, which is that this newer incarnation of Aborym is simply inferior.

This brings me to Fabban. He is not the Fabban of yesteryear. On this album, and, presumably live, his biggest contribution now seems to be vocals, with some synth work, both programmed and performed. Here's the rub, though: these turn out to be banal in most except a few songs. His vocals bring nothing new to the table on this album, either the clean variety or the dirty (excuse the pun) variety; both are exceedingly generic and lead me to believe Fabban bit of way more than he could chew on this album. The synth work suffers the same issues, too; even in the better songs, they remain pretty run of the mill, except for some interesting work on "Helter Skelter Youth", which still suffers some problems of blandness. There are others helping Fabban with the programming and synth work, but it all seems more in pursuit of looking grandiose or dramatic, instead of actually doing the work necessary to accomplish that. Too many corners are cut here for my taste, it seems. It also seems Fabban's ego is finally taking Aborym down, and perhaps that's why Nysrok left.

This all is to say I really am dismayed now that Nysrok is gone, as well as nostalgia for Attila as well. I liked Psychogrotesque, and I like Dirty to a somewhat lesser extent, but the signs are ominous. I'll await the next album with much suspense, because I feel really bad feelings about the direction Aborym is taking. The riffs just aren't as plentiful, it seems, as they used to be. Essentially, too many times Pieri takes the easy route and just does simple barre chords, and while it's nice to have keyboards take the lead every so often, it would be nice to see Pieri play some real neck-breaker riffs, which he does less here than he did on Psychogrotesque. I'm not demanding that Aborym return to their old sound, but the saturation with simple open-chord riffs leaves a little bit to be desired here, and a few meaty riffs here and there would do wonders.

Don't let this diatribe fool you into thinking that Dirty is a terrible album. It's not. It's just that I know that Aborym are clearly cabable of better stuff, and it seems that nobody is really playing to their strengths here. Every musician and staff member, from Bard Faust to the production team, is clearly capable of better. As I said earlier, I await the next Aborym album with great apprehension. It's either gonna be great, or it's gonna completely suck, buried in its own self-indulgence. As it stands, Dirty is hovering on the edge of mediocrity. I await in fear of my favorite band's future.

The interlocution of extreme metal and electronica/industrial elements is one I've followed for quite some time now, having worked on several such projects personally that hybridized jungle, trip hop, breakbeat and ambient with harsh guttural or snarled vocals, tremolo picked guitars or just straight out lattices of calculated chugging since the middle of the 90s. In that time, I've noticed two overarching camps emerge from the process: esoteric artists who remain alongside, or ahead of the curve, utilizing minimalistic or modernist 'glitch' concepts, meticulously constructed industrial rhythms, and those who simply seek to fold redundant techno cliches from the late 80s or 90s into the convention of metal riffing techniques, double bass and blasted drum patterns, often dialing up the speed to levels not expected of living, breathing musicians.

Italians Aborym have always interested me, since they seem to strut along the razor-thin line between these two: occasionally summoning up some inspired progressions, but just as often subsisting off some groan- inducing cyber rave bullshit circa Combichrist, Marilyn Manson, whatever. Granted, the latter can be entertaining if done well, but that's just not always been the case here. While their debut Kali Yuga Bizarre remains their career highlight for me, thriving off an apocalyptic, ritualistic foundation that was a more novel concepts in its day, I've found a lot of the intervening material (four albums worth) to be rather inconsistent in quality. Dirty, the group's sixth full-length, was a study in contrasts from first exposure. The surreal, inverted city skyline on the yellow background gave me the impression this might have been a fully electronic outing, perhaps by way of Autechre or Aphex Twin (there IS a song here called "Raped by Daddy", so that might have just been mental association with "Come to Daddy"). But, by and large, this is business as usual, a mix of the dichotomy of components I mentioned above.

Dirty ultimately amounts to a nightmarish landscape infusion of acoustic and electronic sounding drums with a heavier emphasis on blast or 'gabber' styled beats, denser chugging, power chords, or tremolo progressions on the guitars that quite often play second fiddle to the atmospherics, and wretched black rasped vocals that unfortunately often give way to some weak, clean singing. Which, in no case, ever really enhances the music or gives me any respect for the band's eclectic intentions. Several of the lyrical choices here are just too goofy to stomach, like the higher pitched, nerdy repetitions of 'Fuck you' that adorn the bridge sequence in "Irreversible Crisis"; but the vast majority of intonations here are drenched in Malfeitor Fabban's decrepit, impetuous drawl which resembles Agathon on the older Gloomy Grim records. The synthesizers definitely run the gamut from wave-rave pads, to chopped and craftily syncopated surgical patterns, to more of a freakish, sweltering post-modern orchestration. You can tell a lot of effort when into their structuring, and to evoke a suffocating sense of both factory floors and gas-lit dystopian streets, which is sort of the point.

The industrial sounds are well plotted to create a mixture of harder edge IDM and old school assembly line atmospheres, which are then slathered in the meatier, opaque pummeling guitars. Truth to be told, as I went through the first disc a number of times, interesting patterns emerged. "Across the Universe" and especially "Bleedthrough" impressed me, but "Dirty" itself lapses into some pretty memorable, crashing grooves. Then you've got a song like "Face the Reptile" where some of the speed and forcefulness is alternated with a more haunting, dissonant field of notation that gives the listener some space to revel in his/her horror. Though I would not say that this was a 'standout' record in term of catchy guitar lines, they're at least properly fixed to the electronic rhythms, so it feels as if they were all composed simultaneously rather than arbitrarily tossed onto a beat as an afterthought. Bass lines are loud and probing where they need to be, and the mix, while hostile and abrasive, is rich enough that you can detect the subtleties of the electronics. A lot of folks will dislike the choking level of detail on principle, but it's working as intended.

Alas, I just can't stand the clean vocals anywhere on this album, and it just doesn't seem like the sort of work which required anyone's 'Inner Goth' to rear its ugly head. I would have been fine with just the rasps, growls and maybe some ear-splitting screams. It also doesn't help that the two reworked pieces on the bonus disc, "Roma Divina Urbs" (from the debut) and "Fire Walk With US" (from the sophomore of the same name) remind me of how much more I liked those albums than this one. Riffs and atmosphere are perhaps less harried, but immediately more evocative of the dark mental spaces the band inhabits. Not that there's an incongruity in how they got from 'there' to 'here'. No, it's a natural progression, but one could say they haven't evolved a whole lot since the second or third effort, and that the experimentation which initially distinguished Aborym might have reached the last stop on the line somewhere in the mid-00's. This feels as if they've become a bit comfortable with the rampant, metal-injected techno-trauma, and thus it doesn't exhibit the eclectic, uncanny variation you know they are capable of.

The cover choices on the second disc are, in fact, diverse, but also some pretty safe choices. "Hallowed be Thy Name" has an interesting first verse sequence where they basically introduce Iron Maiden to a Dance Dance Revolution platform with pulsing, sweeping synthesizers, but after that transforms into a fairly normal 'extremified' rendition. Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" is given a straight forward, if somewhat more orchestral and dramatic treatment, and it might be the one place on the album where the cleaner vocals don't make me cringe, with the caveat that they're aping Trent Reznor closely. Aborym also delivers us an interpretation of "Comfortably Numb" which is slightly more acidic and psychedelic due to the enhanced use of electronics over the original, but the interplay of vocals and instruments simply isn't as smooth and effective as Floyd did it. Don't get me wrong, it's cool that the Italians have such broad influences that they want to share, but aside from one-time curiosities these tunes don't provide much lasting impact, and the reworked originals do not necessarily supplant the older versions, even if the production feels more fluid.

In the end, Dirty definitely was not the disaster it might have been, but there are a few obstacles which hindered my enjoyment. If you're a devotee of electronic/extreme metal bastardizations, and seek heavily layered, textured and nightmarish material to dance your life away, you might find enough exhilaration here to make it worth the while. The album's like an oil rig: imposing and unnatural, with lots of working parts and rusted foundations and surfaces, and that alone is interesting enough to explore. But coming away from the experience, did it dim my perspective? Leave a scar on my psyche? Thrust me into the dystopian dreams I so often encounter through the ciphers of music, film and literature? I can't say that was the case, but to the Italians' credit, at least they dumped a lot of planning into its design.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com