Let’s get the main thing out of the way right up front: Dirty is not a good album. In fact, it’s a pretty lousy album. But, okay, let’s give them that. Win some, lose some, etc. Because, after all, it’s a pretty simply thing to put out a lousy album. Hell, most albums are probably pretty lousy, when you get right down to it. However, it’s another thing altogether to put out a pretty lousy album at this point in a band’s career, let alone after a string of good to great albums. Despite the fact that the career of Italy’s bastard sons Aborym has produced generally diminishing returns punctuated by several massive high points — Fire Walk With Us and Generator, in particular — Dirty is by far the worst album of the band’s career, and crudely illustrates what kind of shambling embarrassment the fusion of black metal and industrial can become when not wielded intelligently. Dirty is a sodden, sorry mess.
To again put it rather bluntly: Far too much of the album feels like bits of KMFDM and Rammstein loosely stitched together with generic blasting and either distorted screaming or grating, warbly, goth-y clean vocals. Does that sound like a recipe for success to you? If so, please direct yourself to the nearest exit back into whatever parallel universe you’ve slipped in here from. Album opener “Irreversible Crisis” introduces listeners to one of the album’s cardinal sins: those guitars just… sure aren’t doing much, are they? A fourth quarter guitar solo can’t save things, either. Moments of promise crop up here and there, like when skittering drill ‘n bass breaks open the title track, but the song too quickly devolves into fairly hackneyed rave-chord mashing with third-rate Atari Teenage Riot sound effects in the background.
None of the album’s ten songs stand out, unless for awful reasons. (For example: The less said about a song clumsily titled “Raped by Daddy” which samples a moaning woman, the better.) The rest blur together into a barely passable mush of blitzing drums and guitars stretched thinner than cotton candy. The industrial effects lack any real character, the vocals are mostly shapeless and one-dimensional, and the songwriting style is flat. The clean vocal chorus on “I Don’t Know” ends up sounding mostly like latter-day Dave Mustaine singing over a rejected Fear Factory tune. So… yeah.
Later, a brief tantalizing thought: a song with a title like “The Factory of Death” could probably be a formidable sound experiment in the hands of a more capable band. Instead, Aborym mostly does the same tired thing the rest of the album does, and then throws some vaguely carnival-ish piano plinking on the top of it. Here’s a friendly tip, guys: Nightwish does the Danny Elfman thing much better. So did Arcturus. And Devin Townsend. And UneXpect. And… everyone? I mean, really, the only pertinent question “The Factory of Death” raises to this particular listener is, “Why bother having guitars at all?” Finally, though, “Face the Reptile” sees the guitars actually, y’know, playing riffs, and it’s also – not coincidentally – one of the album’s brightest spots, but of course it’s too little too late, at least for yours pukingly.
Sometimes it feels like I’m one of the last cheerleaders standing for black/industrial metal. When done intelligently and viciously, it can be, well, thrillingly vicious and intelligent all at once. But sadly, Dirty is yet another poison-tipp’d arrow in the quiver of the increasingly numerous skeptics out there. I still hold out hope for another 666 International; another Deleted Scenes from the Transition Hospital; another Dodecahedron. But please, pretty please: not another loaf of rye bread left in a vat of stale water like this album – bloated, limp, shapeless, and frightening only because it still offers the slightest reminder of what it used to be.
