Filament 38

ReGen Magazine

When you think of Cleveland, OH and music, you really don't think of the city as home to artists and bands in the Goth and industrial genre. The truth is Cleveland is home to at least one industrial band called Filament 38. Unstable is Filament 38's follow-up to their debut album, Fractured. Unstable consists of ten original songs and three remixes by Imperative Reaction, Terrorfakt, and Cruciform Injection.

Filament 38 walks the fine line between EBM and industrial music. Every song on the album has those familiar trance synth lines that are reminiscent of a lot today's current crop of bands in the EBM genre. Songs like "Contempt," "Dissect (Infekt)," and "Interface" are propelled by an infectious dance beat that will make the listener think that he or she is listening to Angels and Agony or Imperative Reaction. When Ash sings, he sounds like he is singing and doing spoken word at the same time. He rarely screams throughout the entire album. The music continues to build up with "Suffocate;" the song is darker and more aggressive than the previous tracks, but it maintains that same throbbing bass line and sweeping synthesized melodies that the other tracks have that would make any EBM fan happy. "Blood" is an interesting song, consisting of sampled sounds of children being showered by machine guns. The idea sounds a bit unnerving but surprisingly enough the samples work. The samples are not explicit and pretty tame. Without the samples the song would not have that same apocalyptic feel that it has. Normally, when bands add remixes on to the album as bonus tracks, the remixes are often uninteresting and repetitive. Whoever does the remix either just throws a bunch of added unnecessary dance beats, or he or she totally massacres the song during the remixing and turns into a completely different song. Thankfully, the remixes on Unstable are not repetitive or massacred beyond recognition. Imperative Reactions remix is easily the best of the three on the album with their remix of Dissect. With remixes, the melody often gets lost in the remixing process, but in the case of Dissect (Imperative Reaction Remix), the melody is still there. The only difference between the album version and Imperative Reactions version is the beats; Imperative Reactions version picks up the pace. The weakest remix on the album is Uplink (Terrorfakt Remix). The song became quite repetitive with the throbbing bass lines and the industrial beats that pounded incessantly like a jackhammer. The vocals were barely there. Suffocate (Cruciform Injection Plastic Remix) was fairly interesting, but it also lacked the same appeal of the original version like the Terrorfakt remix of Uplink. Suffocate (Cruciform Injection Plastic Remix) lacked the dark, heavy, throbbing bass line that gave the song its dark and sinister sound.

Whatever flaws there are on Unstable, they are relatively minor. The music may not be groundbreaking or innovative, but Unstable is a good album. The music is an interesting mix of EBM and industrial, with plenty of sweeping synthesized melodies and corrosive industrial beats, enough to satisfy any fan of both genres.

03-Jul-2005 by Lucretia