Dusk – Industrie
Dusk – Industrie
Self-Released
Release Date: 31/05/24
Running Time: 35:46
Review by Dark Juan
Score: 10,000,000/10
Dark Juan is a man of many and varied tastes – be it in debauchery, where his experiences are manifold, or drinking, where beer is just as acceptable as absinthe or a particularly fine and chewy red wine, or music, where the tastes of Dark Juan run from the abstruse to the obscene. You are just as likely to find Dark Juan listening to the sparkliest of Electropop, the moodiest of Goth or the most extreme Metal he can lay his hands on. It is this eclecticism that enables Dark Juan to appreciate Metal more fully than most, because I have some form of baseline to craft my opinions on, and Dark Juan is NOT an expounder of the theory that someone can only like one style of music. Yes, Metal is a thirty-six-year long love affair and counting, as is Goth and Industrial – but simply taking yourself out of a particular genre of music and listening to stuff that is completely different gives you an insight into Metal you never had before.
It also gives the performers whole new horizons to aim at, and all music, be it Metal or not, reaches a point of stagnation. You need only look at the rise of Grunge, or Nu-Metal, or Grindcore, or even (God forbid) Emo for proof of this. These genres of music came about specifically because of people getting bored with Trad Metal. It is all very well to be a fan, and Dark Juan is, of Trad Metal, but it also has (at several points throughout its existence) got boring as fuck as bands rehashed the same old tropes time and again.
Hence the rise of more extreme genres. Like Black Metal, for example, where the tropes of Satanism, misanthropy, and the lack of opportunity for young people in the Nordic countries at the time all coalesced into BM and set off a juggernaut of hatred and isolationist music that refuses to die. It is also a form of Metal that is not very open to new influences with a rather larger set of fans than most who insist on living in the early 1990s and think that Emperor’s “In The Nightside Eclipse” is the nadir of Black Metal and was a bit too romantic and that only Mayhem and Burzum are “real”. Obviously, these people are a bunch of recidivist dickheads who need a good slap and dragging into the 21st Century.
Obviously, Varg needs to be set on fire because he is a fascist fuckwit. Dark Juan will attend to it personally.
There is a reason for the rant culminating in the fiery immolation of Varg Vikernes, and that is because Dark Juan has fired the Platter of Splatter™ into life once again, and this time it is playing the latest release from Dusk, a Costa Rican Atmospheric Industrial Black Metal band. The melding of BM and Industrial music is something that Dark Juan is a particular fan of as it appears to be a perfect fit for the twisted psyche of your good correspondent.
“Industrie” is a violent album. It is the musical equivalent of Brutalism – all exposed concrete, hard edges and a workmanlike aspect that sucks the joy and life out of everything. It is wet, cold, and grey, chilled by arctic winds from which there is no respite and the only sights you can see are more fields and dreams concreted over, under pendulous, leaden skies. It is iron clouds pregnant with freezing rain over the endless expanse of a city’s meat-packing plant and docks, the petrol blue of cranes and steel structures or the rust-stained and scraped yellow of bellowing fork lift trucks the only colour in an otherwise drab and featureless industrial landscape which resonates to a soundtrack of the thump of captive bolt pistols, the off-kilter roaring of diesel engines and the omnipresent electric whirring of air-conditioning units and freezers. Grim men and women don’t so much work in this environment as much as infect it, clad head to foot in gore-splattered whites and meandering dead-eyed from one menial task to another, never uttering a word to each other, merely attempting to dodge the icy rain on their way to their respective tasks or vehicles to escape another day of murder for food…
Dark Juan will always champion a band that sends his imagination into overdrive, and this is what Dusk has done in spades, and part of this is entirely due to the production of “Industrie”, which is thick, workmanlike, almost amateur and entirely mechanical sounding, like an engineer asked to design aesthetics. It works but there’s no beauty there. There is no pretence at finesse, just an overwhelming and at times painful wall of vile, harsh sound kicking the listener in the face and then stamping endlessly upon it, even when it is a bloody, shattered ruin where you can’t tell the sex of the victim anymore. Not since Dark Juan first heard The Berzerker’s debut record has Dark Juan heard something so cold and alienating – the melding of Black Metal and the most mechanical of Industrial music being a thing of terrifying beauty – like an exquisitely crafted weapon of mass destruction. As far as the production goes – guitars and electronics and the drums all fade in and out of thicker than pitch soundscapes over which vocals scream and sheer and howl dementedly over nightmares in musical form. There’s also a cover of Mayhem’s ‘Freezing Moon’ which has had Industrial beats added to it as well as uncompromising blast beats, but Dark Juan prefers the original music on the album, to be honest. It is even more visceral and hateful than Mayhem’s music.
All in all, Dark Juan is a fucking massive fan of Dusk, based on this album because it is just so fucking unremittingly bleak. If there’s any light on it, it is the buzzing and flickering of fluorescent lights in soulless offices, where the only movement is the furtive, half-seen motion of shadowy things behind office doors with frosted glass. If you like music that is Demonic in a wholly mechanical, unending fashion, then Dark Juan heartily recommends Dusk to your attention. If you like music that doesn’t sound like the screaming of a million souls being torn apart in a machine-fed version of Hell, then I humbly suggest you look elsewhere.
On that happy note, I’ll leave you alone for a bit. Sweet dreams.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (El sistema patentado de clasificación de salpicaduras de sangre de Dark Juan, para mis muchos amigos hispanohablantes en todo el mundo. Hola a ti, estés donde estés en el mundo. ¡Saludos desde el Reino Unido!) awards Dusk 10,000,000/10 for a record that has left Dark Juan both homicidal and utterly delighted at the same time. Which really is not a normal state of mind. What a fucking hidden gem of an album “Industrie” is!
TRACKLISTING:
01. Industrie I
02. Industrie II
03. Industrie III
04. Industrie IV
05. Industrie V
06. Industrie VI
07. Freezing Moon
LINE-UP:
Dusk – Programming,Synthesizers, Effects
Shaman – Vocals
Implacable – Guitar
Pàlak – Bass
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
