Reaper – a band I found out by searching for more aggrotech. I like this album, it’s got a dirty dance sound (that’s more an unclean sound rather than lots of songs to which you can dance dirty). There isn’t much in the way of vocals and what lyrics there are seem to be from movie soundtracks. Obviously it’s all rather dark and gory. That just makes it all the better.
HELLectro!
All Beauty Destroyed – Aesthetic Perfection
There are two bands I consider to be the lead players in the aggrotech / hellectro sound. Combichrist and Aesthetic Perfection. One of the saddest things about me finding this style of music is that I started with the best two bands and the rest just don’t quite match up. More in later editions of album review.
All Beauty Destroyed is an awesome album. The beat is perfect for running. The tunes are memorable and the lyrics freak me out. It’s perfect. Favourite songs are:
- A Nice Place To Visit
- Hit The Streets
- Mother*
If you don’t want to kill yourself before listening then this could help you on your way. It’s a fresh approach to dance music with catchy upbeat tunes and samples and then some sick and gravely vocals over the top. It’s all rather over the top and brilliant. It’s emotional gone crazy.
Reaper
This is not a communication about the TV show Reaper, although I thought that was good fun. It is also not about Mr Grimm as what could I say about death? It is definitely not about the rock classic “(Don’t fear) The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult. This communication is about the rare ambiguity that occurs in iTunes.
I rather like the music genre of Aggrotech or as it is also known – Hellectro. There is a band called Reaper who have released some music and recently it appeared that is was quite cheap on iTunes so I downloaded all of it.
The problem is that when I played back the EP “Monsters in my head” it was quite clearly a different genre of music. It was more electro than hellectro. Perhaps this was an early Reaper piece but I had my doubts. A little bit of Internet research and I discovered that there were two Reapers of similar music but different enough for me to spot. Bugger. “Monsters in my head” is a little too clean for me.
So I checked the other Reaper downloads and it turns out that the Reaper album “Gardens of Seth” is by a metal band and definitely not anything whatsoever to do with Aggrotech. The ban might be Italian, definitely not from an English speaking country. As it stands “Gardens of Seth” is rather outdated and has a rather late eighties sound. It is quite good at what it is but not quite what I want. Perhaps I will listen to it more when I’m having an Iron Maiden revival.
The moral of this communication is that you should check discographies on the Internet before downloading songs by an artist whose tunes so far you have rather enjoyed.
Aggrotech or Hellectro
As I explain on the page called My Music in the About Me section, music is something special. If it moves you then enjoy it. Metal is my preferred form of music. Heavy guitars with bass and drums. Vocals not always necessary as it’s just another instrument to me. I don’t really dissect the lyrics but friends if mine do.
Anyway. Rammstein was my band of choice for quite a few years. I go in phases of trying new bands and then becoming a bit obsessed. When my #1 son was born I explained to WW that there were two bands I still wanted to see:
- AC/DC
- Rammstein
If these bands toured I would go and see them. Rammstein sound new and different and so I really liked listening to them and AC/DC are just ace, even if you include the 4 shit albums they made in the 80s and 90s! I guess they are a bit like Iron Maiden. Class bands who keep releasing new material but it’s not as good as the stuff they wrote when they were young and trying to make their place in the world.
I saw AC/DC at Wembley Stadium and also I saw Rammstein at Wembley Arena. AC/DC were, of course, brilliant. Rammstein was just awesome. The support band for the Rammstein gig was called Combichrist. They sounded really good. So, I bought an album, taking a guess at what one might be their best.
Today we are all demons – Combichrist
I loved it. It has no guitars but is very heavy dance music with sick lyrics and metal type vocals. I bought another album and found it was very good to run to.
What the F^^K is wrong with you people – Combichrist
Now it was time to start investigating this rather strange new music style. It turns out it is called Aggrotech which is an off-shoot of EBM. It all came out of the industrial sound and went wild in the Benelux countries. Who’d have thought it eh?
So now I am the proud owner of a number of titles in this genre. It’s good to run to and emotionally a little crazy. Lovely.
- Aesthetic Perfection
- Combichrist
- Icon of Coil
- Scandy
- Suicide Commando
Some other bands I have downloaded recently are:
- Front Line Assembly
- KMFDM
Although these are a bit industrial they definitely don’t fit into an aggrotech shuffle as they have guitars and, trust me, that’s a shock when you are running to sick clubby music to get loud guitars making a din!
My definition of aggrotech is:
Heavy metal with keyboards instead of guitars
or
Heavy dance music with sick lyrics and poor singing