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Reviewed
by: Darklight
Controlled
Fusion is a Dennis Ostermann (In
Strict Confidence) project. I will admit that I didn’t care
for Controlled Fusion’s debut release, so I never followed them after
that album. However, I heard that this latest offering from them was
quite good, so I decided to give it a try. I’m glad that I did because
it is an impressive release. But, unfortunately, it does have some problems.
But I will address those later in the review.
Let me first point out that this band doesn’t really sound like In Strict
Confidence. While you can recognize Dennis’ voice, he does sing quite
differently here. Basically, this is a rather angry and aggressive straight
forward floorfilling dark EBM act. The music is extremely energetic
with frantic electronic programming and relentless beats. Dennis sings
with raw emotion shouting out the lyrics with power. Songs such as “War”,
“Drugfall”, “My Vision” and “Absent” especially stand out,
and are the album’s best tracks. Even the somewhat synth-poppy cover
of “Hit That Perfect Beat” works well here for a little touch
of diversity. But where the album has its problems is with the two instrumentals
“Galaxy Constellation”, “Psychological Way” and the final song
“Steel Town”. The two instrumentals are dark ambient/experimental
tracks that, while good and well placed, are too long dragging on for
nearly ten minutes each. The closing song “Steel Town” is a decent
song, but doesn’t really seem to fit with anything else here as it’s
more of an experimental techno/trance track with dreary altered vocals
that talk out the lyrics instead of actually singing them. The fact
that it’s also about ten minutes long hurts it even more making the
album end in a rather dull fashion. So what starts off as an in-your-face
industrial assault album slowly turns into a mellow experimental album
toward its closing. Amazingly, the band actually pulls this off rather
well due to the track layout.
My main complaint here is that ten minutes is a bit too long for any
song, especially slow and mellow instrumentals. But this shouldn’t turn
you away from this CD as it does flow rather smoothly from beginning
to end. It’s just that you might have to sit through a couple of songs
for longer than you would actually like. But the bottom line is that
there are so many great songs to be enjoyed here that no fan of heavy
dark angry and aggressive european electro-industrial/EBM should pass
on it.
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Reviewed
by: Darklight
This
is a German electro industrial band that sounds a lot like Evils
Toy. However, they aren't quite as good. They are very generic
and don't do anything new. The music is created with synths, electronics,
drum machines, samples, and distorted vocals. It's your typical fast
paced and catchy German industrial music. I don't feel that we needed
another band to come along and imitate Lećther
Strip, :wumpscut:, and
Evils Toy. Why would a band want to sound like so many other bands
before them? You would think that they would at least bring something
new to the music. But Controlled Fusion is content with just copying
a sound as opposed to creating one. They're not bad. Every song is energetic
and angry. But you have already heard this same exact music several
times before.
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