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*Checks post date*

Wow! That's one hell of a long round... lol

Ah... Well, then...

Good luck with that... confused

I'm actually working on finding the tracks I'm missing. I picked up a copy of Ministry's With Sympathy, but the last tracks skip.

As I can't find the final tracks for the album that I want to be my first full review, I'm going to go over my last two purchases, and try to be as honest and impartial as I can. Also, it's an easy way to write a cheap and quick review.

Rising from the Underground: The Crüxshadows' Sophia

The Crüxshadows' newest single, Sophia, was something I picked up because it was cheap and I had ten bucks to blow. I'll not mince words and say that last few actual releases (not counting the practically classic ...Night Crawls In finally getting reissued) were dissapointing mixes of inspired dance floor anthems and absolute filler. 2003's Ethernaut was an prime example of this, with songs such as the fantastic "Winterborn (This Sacrifice)" being wedged against tracks such as "Untrue", which I'd be merciful if I called b-side quality. In short, I wasn't expecting this single to be anywhere as good as everyone was claiming it would be.

Thank God I was wrong. Vergil 'Rogue' DuPont outdoes himself on vocals yet again, managing to convey a sort of desperate nervousness during the verse, and that same commanding immediacy that made "Winterborn" so good is used to full effect during the bridge and chorus. The music manages to be upbeat without the tone of the song being lost, which is in of itself very much an epic. The lyrics conjur images of the divine, or at least the otherwordly. Granted, this is pretty standard for the band, but this is done especially well.

The single itself contains the album version of the song, which is assumedly what we'll be hearing on the upcoming Dreamcypher, and a fairly faithful, slightly catchier radio edit. There is also the "Here I Am" club edit, because it simply wouldn't be a darkwave single without a remix. The club edit does make it a fair bit dancier without losing the impact of the song, so mission accomplished there, guys. The two additional tracks, "Adrift" and "Titan" are classic Crüxshadows, managing to be at once creepy and enticing, with a fair bit of mytholgical imagery thrown in for good measure.

There's no small number of fans worried about the future of the band, since the single managed to do the unthinkable and wedge itself securely in the Billboards Top Ten Dance Tracks, typically reguarded as a bastion of mainstream sell-outs such as Nine Inch Nails and Mindless Self Indulgence. Given the fans-first, tour-heavy methodology of the band (who, as backed up by Wikipedia, usually spend a good third of the year touring the US and Europe), and their reissuing of masterful Mystery of the Whisperand Until the Voices Fade... EPs with additional tracks as an affordable 2-disc set, I think we have nothing to worry about. The Crüxshadows may, in fact, be the Goth scene's first big foray into the mainstream light since the days of Peter Murphy's solo career. Thank God, we couldn't have picked a better band.

Final Score: 9.25/10 rivets.
Favorite Tracks: Sophia (Album Version), Sophia (Here I Am club edit).

What do you know, Deutschland: KMFDM's Hau Ruck

Post-Slick Idiot KMFDM is something that people either love or hate, with really no kind of in-between. A lot of people feel that, without either Shulz or En Esch, Adios was the band's last real album, and using the name without them is like Christian Death keeping the name after Rozz Williams left. On a tangent, Given the fact that everyone and the brother (including Skinny Puppy's Nivek Ogre and music icon Nina Hagen, a combo I never thought I'd see), Adios would have made a fantastic last album. I'll have to review it some time, if I can get myself drunk enough to think that 12/10 is a review one can give something and still keep at least a Pitchfork Media-level of professional appearance.

Reguardless, Hau Ruck (the German equivilant of "Heave Ho") is a fantastic album. Konitezko's vision harkens back to a much earlier time period in the KMFDM catalogue. Songs such as "Free Your Hate" and "Feed Our Fame" sound like they'd just as easily fit on 1988's Don't Blow Your Top (which was the last time a KFMDM album name was longer than 5 letters). Other tracks, such as "Professional Killer" and "Hau Ruck" prove that the band understands the need to keep their sound current with an aggrotech-dominated industrial scene, and manages to blend a perfect amount of synth into the heavy-beat, guitar driven sound.

Ultimately, the album manages to outlive the other post MDFMK albums in enjoyability. There are no bad tracks, which is more than I can say for Attak and WWIII - which were great albums in of themselves, but seemed to be lacking a certain oomph to them. Kind of like this paragraph.

KMFDM is currently on tour with the modern industrial juggernaut known as Combichrist, and it becomes painfully obvious when looking at the remix album Ruck Zuck (and for that matter Combichrist's recent single, "Get Your Body Beat") how much the two bands have rubbed off on one another. Adding in the fact that the rest of the pre-90's albums (What Do You Know, Deutschland?, Don't Blow Your Top, and UAIOE, with the bands original Opium already out again) have been recently remastered and re-released, and now's a great time to be getting into KFMDM. With the other 'big three' of 90's industrial (Skinny Puppy and Ministry) either broken up or semi-retired, it's nice to see that KMFDM is indeed "doin' it again".

Final Score: 8.5/10 Rivets
Favorite Tracks: Free Your Hate, Professional Killer, Ready to Blow