By DJ Astrocreep
When the PR involved sent across the ‘Future Crimes’ single, I was pretty interested in hearing more of what Matt Boroff had, though it’s fair to say I wasn’t expecting quite what the album actually contains. A deliberately jarring couple of tracks, put in to almost cleanse your musical palette of what you’ve just heard, alongside ups, downs, and all-around – allow me to go into more detail…
‘Beautiful Machine’ actually strikes me as generally less industrial overall than I’d expect from ‘Future Crimes’, but that isn’t to say that’s a negative. While I do have a certain musical passion for industrial, hearing an artist meld different feels and genres into an album, rather than have one sound permeate an entire album, always tends to sit better with me. You look at luminaries such as Nine Inch Nails and even on their debut they had different feels with tracks such as ‘Head Like A Hole’, ‘Sanctified’ and ‘Something I Can Never Have’, with this showing that the craft Matt has honed in his previous releases (this is his fourth solo album) has been tempered by the boundary-pushing that such artists before him have done, something Matt does pretty well.
‘Let It Come Down’ is the first track on the album where we experience something a bit meatier, after an opening trio that are closer to downbeat alternative pop in their approach, in fact mixing that earlier approach with something that sounds like Combichrist on acid, with bitter sounding, aggression fuelled chorus sounds mixing with an almost minimalistic verse structure in an approach which more closely mirrors the likes of Gary Numan and his differing approaches in his ‘Love Hurt Bleed’ era. ‘Tribal Days’ is a harsher feeling track still, sat around two-thirds of the way into the album and certainly a lot closer to the industrial EBM approach of the aforementioned Combichrist.
The use of a couple of tracks to break up the album is almost jarring in the way that you almost expect or want more of the previous track, serving more as a palette cleanser in a rather interesting approach, as ‘Exit’ – a 35-second almost non-existent entity – almost feels like a wake-up call, considering ‘Tribal Days’ was immediately prior to it, while ‘Reverie’, a just over two minute piano and keys piece performs a similar job after ‘Let It Cool Down’, ensuring that the listener doesn’t delve too far into the maelstrom, kind of like being on a rollercoaster where the breaks are applied just before you hit a major downward slope to pick up speed and get your adrenaline rush, showing an actual good thought pattern to the layout of the album, rather than placing the harder-hitting tracks in a more separated manner from their softer counterparts, instead giving us the lull and crescendo effect three times over.
In terms of subject matter, there is a fair amount of depth to be found here too, as talks of society’s ills can easily be found even scratching the surface on tracks such as ‘Future Crimes’, a track which seems to be an accusatory finger at swathes of western culture, in how we can be, “Guilty of tearing each other apart with outrage and soundbites” to quote the song itself – certainly something we see happening in politics and just day to day life on social media. We also find plenty of alluding to the differing approach of man to technology, from “I don’t need human touch, I don’t need conversation, I need a beautiful machine” invoking a sense of shifting from one technology to another rapidly – such as upgrading a phone to a new model, new games consoles or such – into ‘Trust’ issues: “Lesser evil…petty lies devour people, get your blindfold, get your crutch, it’s a game of death by 1000 cuts” demonstrating quite how some people now treat others.
The approach overall is almost punk-like, despite the musical approach being one of electronics, sampling and such with its dislike and disdain for the way some people abuse technology for personal gain, for venting or maybe something more nefarious still, using a very intelligent, thought-provoking approach to the lyrics if you want to dive deep in and not just admire what are some pretty well written, enjoyable songs even if taken on a much more shallow scale. A very interesting release, full of peaks and troughs, which will leave you feeling like you’ve been on something of an emotional rollercoaster – should you look more deeply at the lyrics – in the same manner that the actual music of the album and its arrangement will take you on the same journey on a more superficial level. An album well worth several plays to properly embrace what the entirety entails.
- ‘Beautiful Machine’ is released on 15 January.
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