Album: "Interference" (1998)
Label: Wax Trax! Records
Style: Heavy industrial
Songs: 10

Reviewed by: Darklight

Cubanate return with a new sound. They now back off on the guitars and focus mainly on repetitive drum and bass style electronic rhythms and beats. As with past Cubanate efforts, this album just doesn't do much for me. The music is noisy, annoying, basic and boring. It's basically created with a bunch of malfunctioning sound effects that seem like they were thrown together. There is no variety to the music here. It's as if they took the same exact pre-programmed drum and bass beats and put them on every song delivered here. While the frantic paced noise plays, Marc Heal shouts out his rough and angry vocals over it. He doesn't sing with harmony. He doesn't carry a tune. He simply yells. The songs are straight forward and never bring in anything to surprise the listener. Once a song starts you can expect it to be exactly the same until it ends. It's angry and aggresive, but dull and drab. There just isn't any creativity here. This entire album sounds like it was recorded in a day. It sounds rushed, unfinished and seems to be missing a lot of things. The music sounds empty. There just isn't a lot happening in it. Cubanate in the past combined the heaviness of metal with techno to make a lot of their songs great for the dance floor. However, there isn't one track to be found on this album that I could see anyone dancing to. It's just a loud and noisy mess of electronic sounds going haywire while shouting overlays it all. As if all of this wasn't bad enough, I find the lyrics in these songs to be rather lame. They don't sound like a lot of thought went into them. If you like more commercial sounding drum and bass electronic music combined with noise, you will probably enjoy this album. Otherwise, I would suggest that you pass.

Album: "Barbarossa" (1996)
Label: Dynamica
Style: Electro Metal
Songs: 9

Reviewed by: Darklight

The music is more up front on this album. The vocals don't just repeat themselves over and over without any breaks like they did in previous Cubanate albums. The music is very electronic with more techno style beats and less guitar. The vocals are distorted and scratchy to eliminate the clean deep accent that they usually have. This is actually a good thing. They blend with the music a lot better now. This is still very energetic hard-core electro metal music that features a lot of heavy guitar and screaming mad vocals. But it's definitely not as repetitive as their previous albums were.

Album: "Cyberia" (1995)
Label: Dynamica
Style: Electro Metal
Songs: 13

Reviewed by: Darklight

This is the second release from Cubanate, and is much better than their debut album "Antimatter". There is extremely heavy and aggressive guitar and screaming mad vocals, but the cyber sounds are very apparent. Also, there is diversity in each of the songs. They're not just straight forward metal. They each have a unique sound. The songs are actually catchy, which is rare for music this hard. But there still isn't enough diversity for my tastes. The songs are a bit repetitive. Different changes and vocal styles aren't experimented with enough. The music isn't dull, but it doesn't really stick out, either. It is pretty basic electro metal music. The electronic touches are nice, but still don't save it. More experimenting, different singing variations, and a variety of samples would help to give the band an even more industrial sound.

Album: "Antimatter" (1993)
Label: Dynamica
Style: Electro Metal
Songs: 10

Reviewed by: Darklight

This album is aggressive. Maybe too aggressive. What I mean by this is that beats and rhythms basically don't exist. This is straight forward guitar driven metal music with some slight electronics added. The vocals are loud and angry. But they are boring. They are the same through a song, on every song. A song will begin fast and mean, the vocals will kick in screaming, and this energy doesn't stop until the song ends. There is not enough diversity found in these songs to make them interesting. Every song ends up sounding the same. There is potential in this band if they concentrate on more electronics and diverse singing styles. As they are now, they are strictly for the mosh pit.