Label: XIII Bis Format: CD
Announcing their return after a decade’s absence on a wave of gritty noise which soon gives birth to a storm of digital rhythmania, Front 242 have chosen an obvious yet fitting title for their new album. The opener “SEQ666” shifts and gurgles from deep, ever growing, rumbling techno-industrial beats through shivers and ripples of analogue synth swoops and elevated keyboard chords, crashing tempos made flesh on the urgency of the pulsebeat demands of rhythm – and time too, of course. Clocking in at over twelve minutes, the hugeness of the track (which is broken down into sections entitled “P”, “U”,”L” “S” and “E”) acts as a full-on, tranced-out statement that Front 242 never really went away, and have popped back to make sure the bodies continue spasming to the harsh — and carefully textured — hard, hard beat.
While 242 have always made brutally beautiful sense on the strobe-set dancefloor, the key to their unique sound is the multi-layered, slightly off-kilter vocals of Richard 23 and Jean-Luc de Meyer. The combination of drilling electronic riffs, massive drums and bass throb and funked-over breakbeats on “Together” is set off into the dense wall of sound which characterised the 05:22:09:12 Off and 06:21:03:11 Up Evil albums of the early Nineties. There are the more reflective pastures of “Triple X Girlfriend” too, where their sense of lyrical melancholy comes to the fore to a slow-burning mix of laid back, dub-dripped rhythms and interwoven effects; “Beyond The Scale Of Comprehension” mixes reflective piano and fizzling oscillators with some outrageously gloopy effects on the vocals, rendering them instantly lysergic as the words float free of gravity and the track flips over the edge into a gurgling noise conclusion.
The equally relaxed uncoiling tube of “No More No More” shivers with tendrils of extended phaser feedback and an squidgy, acidic loop until floor-shaking bass warms up the groove to a boiling point of defibrillated electro-orchestrations The two parts (242 seem to be enjoying dividing tracks up on this album) of “Song” shudder from the untitled prelude’s echo-drenched bleeps, fading beats and interplay of choral evocation and threatening murmers which segues into the harsher, brighter construction of part 2 (AKA “StarCandy”) which takes off trancewards once more. “One” turns back the format, with the opening vocal section “With The Fire” pounding out the mechanical moves whicle “Reverse” clatters and rumbles to an epic halt. The “Open Static” of “Matrix” does exactly what it says — but scratchily — while “MegaHertz” snaps on further dense percussion workouts with the metallic taste of strychnine and a speedy urgency, soon cut with paranoid orchestrations and some of the more menacing vocal FX. As the intensity of layered electronic skittering and psychedelic glissando wrestle with the furious beats, the words “The media, my army, the money, the will” batter themselves skullwards — and it’s decidedly satisfying too that Front 242 still retain their sloganeering touch for mysterious propaganda.
That the two parts of “Never Lost” are titled “Faust” and “Riley” isn’t entirely accidental either, if somewhat tangential to their respective status as pianoey interlude and minimalist ambient techno twinkle, though the latter also brings Dave Brock‘s solo meanders to mind. “7Rain” extends into another version of the track from the Still & Raw EP which proceeded Pulse, immediately identifiable as the 242 tune in the classic self-reflective style (“Am I getting grey?”) on the album, here stepped down several melancholic notches to the weeping piano and rippling glitches. Still, “Pan Dhe Mlhk” prevents Pulse from ending on a low note, bursting forth to the updated hardbeat and reaching for the sublime in the shape of a dancefloor/headfuck trance state, using every break, drop, echoed loop and shudder in the book to get there.
As returns to form go, Pulse fits the bill neatly, bringing back both their full-on rhythmic singlemindedness and lyrics which are often parallel to (yet entirely evocative of) workaday reality, updated and more fully rounded than ever.
-Freq1C-
