It has been more than eight years since anyone last heard from Die Warzau. But with Convenience, the group’s fourth studio album, this seminal industrial band does everything it possibly can to prove it has been well worth the wait.
Convenience, released via the new Pulseblack label, was produced live in the band’s own studio and stands out as its catchiest and most infectious album yet. With it, Die Warzau further cements its reputation as a leader in electronic innovation by blending styles and genres with ease. The founding duo of Van Christie and Jim Marcus remains intact, but is now complimented by Abel Garibaldi and Dan Evans. Christie’s production is raw and aggressive as always, but despite the wild complexity of each song, the material remains strangely accessible. Marcus’ vocal range has grown over the years, and now includes a depth unknown to most industrial artists. Meanwhile, the contributions of Garibaldi and Evans only add to the stylistic and technical prowess of the band as a whole.
Die Warzau was born in the late eighties, when Christie and Marcus were working as individual performance artists in Chicago. After deciding to join creative forces, their early shows became less about music than destruction and visual mayhem, garnering attention from fans, members of the press, and police. Fiction Records, at the time serving as home to bands like The Cure, quickly added Die Warzau to its roster, which proved to be a wise move when the band’s first single, “I’ve Got To Make Sense,” reached number twenty-three on Billboard’s dance chart and topped college club charts.
The singles and full-lengths that followed were greeted by further success both on the charts and with the critics, and the industrial community embraced the band, despite the fact that Die Warzau was not creating the sort of industrial music that most people were accustomed to. Instead, the band defied classification by abusing genre boundaries, and the success it found through such an approach led not only to success as a band, but also to production work with everyone from Björk to KMFDM.
Die Warzau’s last album, 1995’s Engine, was praised by many as one of the greatest industrial records of all-time. With it, the band raised the bar for itself and for everyone else in the world of industrial music. But with Convenience, Die Warzau proves not only that it is up to the challenge of creating something equally remarkable this time around, but also that it is aiming to raise that bar even higher.
For more information, visit their website: http://www.diewarzau.org
Got a correction? Click
Here
Pages linking to this one include:
