Immune

This band are, or rather were, a typical product of the 90’s although their pedigree can be traced back to the short-lived old school thrashers Gammacide, the band who showed so much promise in the late-80’s/early-90’s with their wild frenetic brand of thrash easily bordering on death on the more brutal moments. The guys could have even ruled the death metal scene if having decided to roam it on a more frequent basis…

however, just a few months after their seismic 4-track 1991 demo we see them under a new guise, as Puncture, and with a delivery very close to the oncoming groovy/industrial/post-thrashy vogues. There’s nothing bad in one to want to sound fashionable, and the self-titled debut perfectly exemplified the spirit of the era with its ultra-heavy industrialized brand of post-thrash, coming as a pulverized, angrier version of Pantera. The album reviewed here goes one step further by increasing the industrial gimmicks, the style now moving towards the noisy thrashisms of acts like Ministry, Swamp Terrorists, and Skrew. “Suck City” is the epitome of this newly acquired, vociferous vigour, and the harsh cutting guitars will prick the listener’s conscience no worse than Ministry’s own “Psalm 69”, the over-synthesized vocals adding to the musical paranoia with their distorted semi-whispers ala James Cavalluzo (Malhavoc).

The aggressive thrashy veneer on this audacious number isn’t sustained that rigorously, and “Constrict Command” is a groovy Helmet-esque jumper, with the title-track relying mostly on samples and sound effects to pull it through. The situation on “Six Six Nine” is pretty similar the semblance of music fading even more the band piling more or less appropriate effects on top of each other, “Kill-O-Gram” bringing some dancey lustre to the machine-like noise in the spirit of KMFDM. “Bottom Feeder” tries to improve things by adding a heavy bottom to the proceedings, looking at Soulstorm and to a lesser extent Godflesh with more officiant doomy vibes. “Dutch Fist” is again more on the dancey side of things the guitars having a sharper, thrashier edge which reaches some kind of a culmination on “Pipe Fitter”, a brooding thrasher that nearly matches the opener with its urgent, nervy rhythm-section. It all goes down the drain, though, with “LD/50” which is just industrial all-instrumental eccentricity with not much music involved again.

All the mentioned references are perfectly legitimate, but this doesn’t make this opus a best-of compilation. By 1996 the industrial metal genre had gone way beyond its peak, and although Die Krupps, KMFDM, Ministry, and the freshly sprung Rammstein continued their ascension one way or another, it seemed as though there wasn’t much room for other practitioners from the same branch to walk on that noisy avenue which, truth be told, was becoming quieter and quieter moving towards the end of the decade. Our guys here have put a lot of influences together, but the final result again is not that striking as this whole compendium is so much done by-the-book that at the end the fan will have problems recalling separate moments from this noisy, plain hysterical at times, melee which throws itself from one shade to another in a not very coherent manner thus failing to find its most fitting face before it’s all over. The 90’s metal scene was already looking at more left-hand-path ideas at the time in order to diversify the scholastic boundaries of its offspring and make them last longer, but there are no traces of outside-the-box thinking anywhere here, unfortunately.

Having in mind the ties to Gammacide, one could have expected the band to try their hands on the heavier side of the industrial metal kaleidoscope, where Fear Factory belong, but such developments never came to pass. The band came, saw, and did make their contribution to the rolling groovy industrial roller-coaster by taking care of a few punctures on its thick metalclad tyres.