Red Harvest’s sixth release, “Sick Transit Gloria Mundi,” is a punishing piece of work that would just as soon pummel the listener as rock their socks off- it does a little of both. Crushingly heavy, insistently bleak, surprisingly fast on its feet, with a strong undercurrent of dystopian futurism, the album plays like the angry version of a 1970s JG Ballard story. Fast, razor sharp electro beats pound away under a wall of grinding guitars and snarled vocals. A few songs, especially the machine age anthem “Godtech,” slow things down for a bit of epic grandeur. The opening line “In a world controlled by machines, humans identify with machines” conveys the tone, a picture of a world mired in industrial waste and concrete ruins, lorded over by blind faith in technology. The band also covers GGFH’s “Dead Men Don’t Rape,” a pulverizing, head smashing take on an old feminist slogan. The album is like being crushed under the weight of the state and capital, under a deluge of discarded plastic and old tires. The result is a morass of pleasant ugliness. Recommended reading: Herbert Marcuse’s “One Dimensional Man”
-James Slone
VITALS:
Release: 2002
Label: Relapse
Avantgenre: Overseas Manufacturing Metal
Duration: 63:32
Origin: Norway
Official site: http://www.redharvest.com
Review online since: 31.08.2007 / 03:18:46
TRACKLIST:
01 – U.G.X.
02 – AEP
03 – Godtech
04 – Humanoia
05 – Dead
06 – CyberNaut
07 – Beyond The End
08 – Desolation
09 – Sick Transit Gloria Mundi
10 – Dead Men Don’t Rape
11 – WeltSchmertz
12 – Dead End
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