Black Strobe - Chemical Sweet Girl E.P.

While electro-Goth sounds like a bad idea in theory, Black Strobe manage to make it sound better than one would expect. Maybe their French origins keep them from being too devoted to either English-style Goth or American-style EBM. Certainly, they're peppier. After all, how gloomy could a track entitled "Me and Madonna," with its New Order-style guitar line, be? "Chemical Sweet Girl" has just enough darkness to keep you dancing. You get the sense that Black Strobe are just having fun playing with different genres. The bleepy disco of "Fitting Together" and the straight-up techno of "The Abwehr Disco" prove you can't judge a book by its cover, just as the deep voices of "Innerstrings (No Shuffle Mix)" aren't as ominous as they are campy. Ewan Pearson and Ivan Smagghe take "Me and Madonna" to the disco, while Alter Ego take a stark beat to make "Chemical Sweet Girl" darker. Put away that vampire make-up and dance!

There's no reason to argue the issue: what passes today for EBM is drastically different than what it was about 2 decades ago. What I find interesting about this release is that the apparent influences here seem vastly different than the influences on EBM artists anywhere from 2 - 10 years ago...

Artists such as VNV Nation, Beborn Beton, Funker Vogt or Assemblage 23 could easily have their lineage traced somehow back to earlier gothic and "industrial" musics by tracing the sub-culture's generational gaps and (seemingly) degrading music preferences. It was all very narrow from my perspective, and it's dependence on labels like Metropolis (and on clothing stores like Hot Topic) for any fresh interest forced the whole scene into a virtual remission and provoked an internal crisis of identity - at least for anyone not over 20 years old and privy to information regarding the history of it all. Goth had a firm hold on the music, and EBM began to seem less and less an accurate description.

The music on this CD, contrary to most other CDs that have come out in this genre, takes a lot from the increasingly more popular UK-style electro-clash scene, and artists like Tiga, Technova, etc. Somehow (helping to cast off all the mopey-goth nonsense and flaccid posturing of their fellow EBM'ers) Black Strobe have taken things a little more close to what could be considered real EBM in the new millenium.

Still, at times the music can be kind of goofy and lame and a bit heavy on the synth-popiness. There isn't a whole lot that's dark about the album, it's often a bit electro-housey... but it's fun to listen to, and it's more fresh and moves a lot better than anything in the genre I've heard for awhile.

It's not my favourite thing... nowhere near as good as Front 242 or Nitzer Ebb, but nowhere near as bad as VNV Nation or Apoptygma Berzerk either.