Review Summary: solid Hellektro of the early variety, before Psyclon Nine evolved their own style
I heard Nero Bellum say once in an interview something like (I failed to bookmark it) “I’m just trying to stay ahead of the curve.” I don’t know what “ahead” means exactly -- like biological evolution I doubt that creative art like Psyclon Nine’s has a direction to evolve
towards anything, it just
evolves -- but he definitely
has created his own style, as evinced by their 2022 release,
Less to Heaven, which Simon K. in his review of that album wrote “is a pretty vast departure from” their previous record.
But that distinctive style was not on display yet when Nero released Psyclon Nine’s first album, 2003’s
Divine Infect. This first record is some of the best Hellektro (otherwise known as Aggrotech) of it’s kind, but the style was just evolving back then, and it doesn’t stand out much in style compared to the albums being released by his peers at the time. Hocico and Suicide Commando had been around for a few years by 2003, but Grendel and Amduscia and God Module were all young bands along with Psyclon Nine, forming a kind of “first wave” of Aggrotech.
Again, these were early days, and Psyclon Nine had yet to evolve their distinctive signature. The instrumental parts are very basic in line with Industrial’s minimalist aesthetic, and Bellum was only hinting at the famous
vocal style he was to develop more fully on his second album, INRI; a style which turned me off of their music for years until I opened up and fully gave their 2022 album a chance. It is a totally characteristic style which Simon K. called a “signature shrill”, and Sputnik user
MrMarketingDirector called in his review of Psyclon Nine’s third album
Crwn Thy Frnicatr a “high, distorted shriek that sounds, for better or for worse, like a hawk getting its soul ripped out through its eye sockets.” But Nero hadn’t played around with his vocals yet on our album here, Divine Infect. Instead, he opted for a basic, processed-screaming-whispering-hiss that’s almost indistinguishable from the vocals on Grendel’s and Amduscia’s contemporary records.
Finally, what impresses me most about this album is Nero Bellum’s ability to spin-out
rocking fcuk’n music out of practically nothing. (Of course, critics will maintain that it
continues to amount to nothing, but I guess I assume that any readers who have made it this far in the review are more or less fans of the style, or at least mildly interested in industrial music in general). In my review of Suicide Commando’s
When Evil Speaks, I wrote
ad nauseum about how Johan Van Roy developed music out of just two notes; Bellum did the same in many tracks on our album, but with his own flavor. For example,
Resurrekt,
As You Sleep, and the title track are all built out of the same melodic machinery, yet Bellum added just enough variation to make the similarities almost unnoticeable. That machinery is the simple alternation of two pitches (major 2nd's and minor 3rd's, I think), which creates, to my ears ear anyway, a 4/4 rhythm that keeps trying to push into a more intense 2/4, giving the tracks a march-like militancy with incredible drive.
I’ve ignored Psyclon Nine over the years; I was put off by the vocals, as I said. However I am glad for this, in a way, because now that I’ve embraced Bellum’s vocal style I have an entire discography of top-tier music to “discover.” That doesn’t happen very often.
Some songs from Divine Infect:
- Divine Infekt (opener)
- Resurrekt
- Rusted (perhaps the “slowest” track on the album)
- As You Sleep
A list of aggrotech songs written around the same time as Divine Infect: 7 songs - Aggrotech EARLY:
https://www.sputnikmusic.com/list.php?memberid=1123708
