Front Line Assembly ‎– Millennium

Front Line Assembly try to cash in on NiN's dumbo success with tearing up the guitars, with poor result.

The early 90s' saw the triumph of the "electronics + heavy guitars" formula, experimented by Skinny Puppy in the mid 80s' and then refined and brought to success by Ministry, NIN and KMFDM. Everyone fit into the trend, even underground bands coming from the most extreme regions of electronic music (Iugula-Thor, In Slaughter Natives, Controlled Bleeding, to name a few).

Front Line Assembly threw themselves into the crowd, sampling riffs from Sepultura, Pantera, Ministry, and putting them on top of their wonderful EBM. The result is sometimes excellent ("Vigilante" and "Millennium" the best tracks, alongside "Surface Patterns", with cool riffs from a Pantera song of "Vulgar Display of Power", can't remember the title right now), sometimes a bit excessive and boring. The rap on "Victim of a Criminal" is not that bad in the end, it's just that no one would expect someone to rap on a FLA song, and therefore it's difficult to accept it.

FLA's more melodic and electronic side however emerges in all its glory in "This Faith" and final "Sex Offender", one of their best tracks ever, with cool vocoded vocals. "Millennium" may not be their masterpiece, but still it's a very important chapter in their history.

this album was quite a change for the established industrial duo of FLA. the jump in labels to Roadrunner proved to be good for some fans and bad for others. the main difference between this and other FLA albums is the presence of distorted guitars. on some track the guitar helps the song, on some it can be annoying and ruin it. one track which is absolutely terrible is "Victim of a Criminal". it features some rapper and i skip over it every time i listen to the cd. without the guitar the album still has the same FLA sound we know and love, and i guess the band didn't think too much about this album since they dropped the guitars right away. overall this is a great FLA album to buy, but it's still not their best work.

This (in my oppinion) is one of the best albums i have heard from Frontline Assembly.

It is filled with high pitched sounds in the background which really sounds very "cyber" or "computerised". I like these sounds as it really gives a futuristic type of sound and it also adds to the "lifetime" of the music as such because you will notice new sounds even months after the initial purchase.

According to the CD inlay he also used samples from Sepultura , Ministry and quite a few others ... the strange part is that you never hear any of it ?

if you have not listened to this CD do yourself a fav and get your ears on it ! :)