Jeff Stoddard, after years of cooperation with Front Line Assembly and
Skinny Puppy dared finally to work on his own, resulting in new
project called Roughhausen. Those ones, who were disappointed after the
last pieces of Canadian school of industrial experimental sounds, may
postpone the negative forecast for later. We should not be afraid about
the future of the genre as long as there are albums such as this one.
The album was created at Stoddard’s domestic studio and above all it is strong and consistent. The musician emerged strongly on his consistency, so you get the sound as monolith. The thirteenth in line Jeff’s album entitled "The Agony Of The Beat" is based mainly on industrial and EBM beats, overwhelming tones of factory background and sounds of chain saws and crushing iron. The CD is full of enormous composition and production skills of Stoddard.A surfeit of inspiration and experiments is often damaging, but in the case of this CD Jeff has managed to combine all the fascination in music from industrial rock ("I Know You"), EBM experiments in style of Skinny Puppy ("The Man Pinned"), noise ("The Bad Seed") and stylish juggling electronic core ("Control", "Relentless"). Equally important is powerful machine voice of Roughhuasen vocalist. Ejected with power invectives against commercialization, politics, collapse of global democracy confer the album authenticity.
The albums will make up to us the nervous time of waiting for another (hopefully successful) product of Front Line Assembly or swift resuscitation of Skinny Puppy. In the rigid 70-minute disc the artist placed isolated vocals, guitars and asynchronic sounds, which makes this original material more thrilling.
The album is quite difficult for average listener, but provokes the potential one to carefully listen of every piece and dedication to each one of them. And this is already sufficient recommendation.
Tracklist:
01. The Pinned Man
02. Control
03. The Bad Seed
04. I Know U
05. Sub-nality
06. Fornacis
07. Relentless
08. My War
09. Gut
10. U Better Run
11. Falling Down
12. Fists Of Love
13. An Awakening
Tinderbox Records (2008)
