SKIN CHAMBER — Trial (review)

SKIN CHAMBER — Trial album cover Album · 1993 · Industrial Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4.5/5 ·
Vim Fuego
Imagine the dystopic nightmare worlds of Terminator, The Matrix and 1984. Your thoughts are no longer your own. You are part human, part machine. A higher force controls you, compels you. This is the soundtrack to that nightmare.

The edge between synthetic and organic sounds is totally blurred. Highly distorted multi-tracked guitars squealing, crushing, moaning; thundering staccato bass rhythms, throbbing with mechanical persistence; robotic precise percussive rhythms crash against random clatters of automation and industry. Over it all, Paul Lemnos and Chris Moriarty trade shouts of bellowing anger and hissing malevolence. You can imagine the pair: one red faced, veins bulging and pulsing on neck and forehead, dripping with sweat, shuddering with rage; the other narrowed wicked eyes, a serpent's tongue darting between thin, evil lips.

If NIN is the popular face of industrial, Skin Chamber is the...inbred cousin locked in the cupboard under the stairs, creating and destroying empires among the cockroaches and rats, ready to bite anyone unsuspecting who accidentally opens the door. While Trent Reznor prances about like a Gothic dandy in his Hollywood mansion, exuding pseudo-angst and pathos, this pair would be shovelling coal into the boiler in Reznor's basement, throwing an occasional dismembered body part into the beckoning flames.

The song structures are fairy basic, but so skewed as to be almost unrecognisable as songs. Often they are thrown together with something which sounds like an introduction, and there are verses and choruses, of a sort, and then the songs end, unexpectedly. Time signatures and tempo seem to be treated as a nuisance, to be adhered to every once in a while, but time becomes immaterial. All the instruments are laden with distortion, and at times it is physically impossible to identify where guitars end, bass begins, and where the drums are meant to be. While none of the tracks are as memorable as "Sucked Inside" from the first album ‘Wound’, this is an album best listened to as a whole, rather than broken into individual tracks.

A specialty of this pair is noise. "Swallowing Scrap Metal Part 5" is a 25 minute exercise in endurance for the uninitiated listener. Starting with a rumbling ominous moan, something like depressed Gregorian monks on downers in a cave, the track suddenly crashes head on into your worst nightmare. A storm of sounds hits the eardrums, unidentifiable, indistinguishable, and inconceivable. Painful feedback, screeches to set your teeth on edge, jet engine blasts, static, white noise, make it stop, can't stop...

At once compelling and repulsive, it is electronic Armageddon.
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