![]() Leeb ’s lyrics, while dealing For the Record … ” Caustic Grip was in many ways a breakthrough album for the band. ” He called Leeb and Fulber “two men who make the noise of 50 Uzi-toting renegades gone AWOL in Baghdad. ‘Caustic Grip ’ is as close to being wired to an Electronic Body Music studio console as it gets. For example, Paul Lester, writing in Melody Maker, gushed that “It ’s been a long time since a reinforced battery of sequenced bleep-beats and programmed splashes of electric interference have been marshalled to such overwhelming effect. Their 1990 album Caustic Grip received rave notices in just about every journal that writes about electronic dance music. The band also became a favorite among music critics -at least the tiny minority of them willing to subject themselves to the sonic assault that bands like Front Line Assembly tend to provide. The year 1990 was a banner one for Front Line Assembly, as that year two of the bands singles, “Iceolate ” and “Provision, ” became huge hits among the techno/dance crowd, and were played incessantly in clubs all over the world. Subsequently, Fulber became a full-time member of Front Line Assembly. Around this time, Balch decided to leave the band in order to move on to other projects (including a stint with the popular industrial band Ministry). ” It also led to the band ’s first European tour and the production of a live album, Live, recorded at its last U.K. The album contained two major hit dancehall singles in “No Limit ” and “Digital Tension Dementia. Later that year, seven tracks from Corrosion, four tracks from Disorder, and three previously unreleased tracks were combined and released as a new full-length CD under the title Convergence.įront Line Assembly became a dance club sensation in 1989 with the release of the album Gashed Senses and Crossfire. The band put out a mini-album, Disorder, (again on Third Mind) just three months later. By that time Balch ’s role had grown from mixing and producing help to full-fledged membership in Frontline, and another friend, Rhys Fulber, was on board as a studio assistant. Only a month later, the band jumped to the British label Third Mind for its next album, Corrosion. In January of 1988 Leeb and company released State of Mind on Dossier, a German label. The band followed up with two more albums in two months, each on a different label. The limited-release cassettes were strong enough to capture the attention of the Belgian label KK Records, and it was on that label that Front Line Assembly -at that point a two-word name, Frontline Assembly, and essentially a one-man band, namely Leeb -released its first real album, The Initial Command, in December of 1987. These homemade tapes were later remastered and released by Cleopatra Records as Total Terror I and Total Terror II. Working mostly by himself, with occasional assistance from a friend, Michael Balch, Leeb recorded two cassettes in 1985, War and Total Terror, and Front Line Assembly was born. Seeking to escape the jarring sounds of Skinny Puppy without sacrificing any of the integrity and grit, Leeb began experimenting with a captivating combination of rhythm, sampling, keyboard effects, and anguished vocals. Known at the time as Wilhelm Schroeder, Leeb eventually felt that his contribution to Skinny Puppy was not substantial enough, and he left to launch a project of his own. He learned the ins and outs of electronic music during his stint with Skinny Puppy in the first half of the 1980s. Leeb was born in Austria and emigrated to Canada as a child. Leeb has changed partners twice since the band was founded -Rhys Fulber replaced original member Michael Balch in 1990, and was in turn replaced by Chris Petersen in 1996 -but the band ’s dark vision and relentlessly aggressive approach to sound have remained constant. Founded by Bill Leeb (formerly of the band Skinny Puppy), Front Line Assembly has created a string of techno recordings over the last decade that has made it one of the genre ’s most popular acts. The name Front Line Assembly may not be familiar to fans of pop music but to those who appreciate the hard-edged, electronically-generated sounds of industrial dance music, this Vancouver-based duo is truly a favorite.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |