Control Human Delete – The Prime Mover Review

An unfortunate side-effect of the otherwise glorious surfeit of excellent heavy metal currently churning around in the fetid underground is that “pretty good” is rarely good enough anymore. Pair that general observation with the fact that, to these ears, The Prime Mover represents a fairly sizable drop-off in quality from Control Human Delete’s debut album Terminal World Perspective, and you might be forgiven for writing this off as a bit of a dud. The Prime Mover is defiantly not a bad album, however, and the way in which it hit this particular listener upon repeated listens is an important reminder about recalibrating one’s expectations.

All of which sounds pretty wagon-flipping dour for a review of a heavy metal album, right? Well, hush your mouth for a spell anyway, and keep carving those notches in your “Diminishing Returns 2013” countdown shiv of my unending fascination with industrial black metal.

If anything, The Prime Mover hews even closer to the industrial side of the spectrum than most metal under the general black/industrial umbrella, which ought to at least give the lie to the claim that all industrial black metal is simply black metal with machine noises soldered on haphazardly. From a compositional perspective, The Prime Mover is almost totally alien to black metal’s prevailing tropes. These songs indulge in long stretches of open space with little sense of clear trajectory; they layer precision guitar chugs against samples, and deliberately programmed and proudly artificial-sounding beats against keyboards, without giving obvious precedence to any one such input over the others; and they start, stop, pick up again, and turn about in place according to a largely inscrutable internal logic.

This modus operandi produces occasionally thrilling results, but only after the realization that it’s helpful to focus on these songs as atmospheric set pieces rather than riff-driven metal songs. That can be a dangerous gambit, though, because once you’ve eschewed the main stuff of heavy metal (i.e., riffs), an album lives or dies on the much more tenuous basis of a sustained, engrossing atmosphere. It’s on this count that The Prime Mover ultimately struggles more than it soars.

The atmosphere isn’t a complete flop, though, so long as you’re okay with the fact that large chunks of the album wouldn’t sound at all out of place on the roster of more aggressive-leaning electronic music labels like Hymen or Ad Noiseam. As far as (marginally) more metallic fare is concerned, Thee Maldoror Kollective (circa New Era Viral Order) is a decent comparison, but incomplete. The stuttering programming of “Transporter” is integral in keeping the listener on uneasy ground, and “Shapeshifting” is quite impressive, with frankly immaculate detail in its programming throughout.

However, the album is least convincing when it goes too slowly. The first half of “Continuous Data, Part 1” sounds overly simplistic and restrained, where it seems the intended effect was calculated menace. The song improves dramatically through the tail-end, though, with the overwhelming blitz of programmed hyper-blasts and intriguing touches of organ. The opening minutes of “Earth-Like Behavior” suffer the same torpidity, but “Continuous Data, Part 2” is a much sprightlier thing, by virtue of both a more aggressive overall approach and more prominent guitarwork, which occasionally butts into the mix with quick, needling, twinned lines that call to mind the Axis of Perdition’s The Ichneumon Method. The Prime Mover’s biggest deficit, though, is the largely one-dimensional and often irritating vocal performance. The vocals mostly come across as a grumbly sort of narration, and are pushed much too high in the overall mix.

But as I said, this is still a pretty good album, and that ain’t nothing. Maybe the strongest compliment I can pay the album is to say that it is extremely self-assured. One gets the feeling that this is precisely the way the band wanted the album to sound, and that any negative reactions are simply a matter of taste. Personally, the album helped to shake loose some unacknowledged build-up in my own listening brain: that ever-so-tempting corrosive default reaction of “if it isn’t totally awesome it’s totally shit.” Listening to this in light of my greater appreciation for the band’s debut meant that my first three listens to The Prime Mover rocketed through the following trajectory of affect: 1) disappointment and irritation; 2) over-excitement and redemption; and 3) recognition that it’s pretty good, full stop.

In Aristotelian philosophy, the prime mover is that which causes all motion but is not first moved by anything else; the unmoved mover. Control Human Delete’s motion is not without antecedents, and while I remain mostly unmoved after the encounter, the future that the band hopes to bring into being is very much its own. And for that, I ain’t mad at ’em.

Posted by Dan Obstkrieg

Happily committed to the foolish pursuit of words about sounds. Not actually a dinosaur.

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