Band: Xentrifuge

Album: Light Extinguished

Album Year: 2007

Label: COP International

Genre(s): Terror EBM, Power Noise

Website: myspace.com/xentrifuge

Tracklisting:

 

Xentrifuge is one of the most recent bands signed to Noitekk / COP. Xentrifuge, as most people know is the live drummer of Life Cried and so the comparisons are always many and inevitable. I won’t bore you with those here; you can view them in almost any other review ever. I will start by saying this: yep, Xentri is your typical new Noitekk band.

To get right down to it, Light Extinguished is one of the most boring Terror EBM albums I’ve ever heard. The production is terribly muddy and the sounds are barely distinguishable from one another. To the album’s credit, Soman does a great job of mastering this very loudly and the bass kick sounds absolutely huge and pounds through every track. And that is about the end to the albums positive production qualities. Every track seems to use the same 5 drum hits, the same pad, the same exact vocals, and extremely similar chiptune-esque arpeggiated leads. The distorted drums, bass and pads sloppily smother one another while trying to vie for position in the mix and the result is they’re all compressed into a muddy wall of what could loosely be described as harsh pounding power noise. On top of this every track has some kind of nearly laughable video game sounding arpeggiated synthline. These synthlines are not bad per say, and I even enjoy many of them…however they just do not seem to fit this kind of music. Every song follows roughly the same format, every song sounds exactly the same, and every song lacks any sort of emotion or driving force behind it. Every track is 4-5 minutes of straight brutal pounding with torrents of overly effected and completely indiscernible vocal sludge. From start to finish, the tracks lack any dynamics or well crafted (read: interesting, thought provoking, challenging) bridges/fills/sections/what have you to take my attention away from the jackhammer of the bass kick. For Xample: ‘ICBM’ starts off like a great power noise track, it’s got a huge slamming beat and seems to have everything going for it, but then the beat starts to drag…and drag…and then the same pad that’s featured in every other track comes in and kills the driving sense of the beat and then it just loops over and over and over. I feel that the tracks lack substance, conviction and offer no redeeming technical qualities. The tracks have no atmosphere to them and there is no sense of meaning or being within them. I don’t remember there being any samples on the entire album, which I feel is something small that could have spiced it up or added at least a sprinkling of atmosphere. The final track attempts to do something different by bringing aboard the vocalist of Life Cried; however I feel like this track fails to deliver a worthwhile listen. The vocals here are much better than the rest of the album: they are a good deal less muddy and sound more akin to angry or tormented screaming, however they never shut up! The entire track is the same drum beat over and over and over and non-stop screaming. This might sound driving and brutal, but it grows stale quickly when there is no downtime to compliment the supposed brutality. Which brings me to my last question: what the hell does Paragon Void mean exactly? Maybe if I could understand some of the words I would know. Terror EBM could be so much more than this, but Xentrifuge appears content to simply create the bare minimum required. This album is yet another example of extremely basic, linear Terror EBM which has sadly become the status quo.

Though it has many faults, there are still a few tracks that any fan of harsh industrial should check out. Downcast is the first. Despite being muddy and the vocals sounding like sludge, it’s a brutal club stomper and will most likely please any fan of terror. The Wires Speak, a more “power noise” style track, is the best on the album in my opinion because it actually sounds a bit different. It’s less muddy and works more on melody rather than brutal overkill drumming. It has some really terrible muted vocals (I think they’re supposed to be vocals?), but they’re brief, really quiet, and easy to tune out.

Overall, Light Extinguished is a horribly generic album that does nothing for the genre. Check out a couple of the tracks if you like, but that’s really all you’ll need because they all sound the same.

-[.d4n b4rr3tt.]