Feted label Ghostly International declared that this album has Kill Memory Crash "ushering in a new era of industrial music with a calculated assault on the post-Warp electronic scene." Superb, a call to arms for the factory unions to overthrow the petty, bourgeois pencilnecks who stare at their laptops during concert to emit neutered, pasteurized, and deracinated versions of glories past from the Warp Records Internationale of Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, and Plaid. What is the manifesto, my comrade? Simple: Pretend that the last 15-odd years of industrial dance music didn't happen and concoct music accordingly-- that is dance like it is 1990.
True, the "post-Warp" zeitgeist could use a smack upside the head as it is still locked into the point where faster and more convoluted rhythms and harmonics are demanded. But I doubt that Kill Memory Crash's second release on a label that is sometimes guilty of being "post-Warp" will stamp an impact, as they play fairly generic, club-filler Electronic Body Music (EBM)-- the descendent of Skinny Puppy, Front 242, and Nitzer Ebb, translating industrial's mechanical rhythms and metal guitar grind into disco for sulking, malnourished vampires
Kill Memory Crash are vets from Chicago's industrial/EBM underground who've sporadically released a few singles since the mid-90s. American Automatic shows that their work could assist a Hollywood producer searching for the right background music for scenes when the hero cop marches into an "underground club" full of bikers, sneering dominatrixes, and hackers bent on world domination. The death disco strut of "Demento" marches along with fuzzed-out serial killer murmurings, clichŽd computer garbling, and bass drops. Kill Memory Crash also kick in obligatory nods to metal with synthesized guitar riffs, although on the auto-piloted "Battery" they lack the belt-sanding friction of Ministry and KMFDM.
To its credit, the group has a good ear for synth programming, as exemplified by "Doorway Nine"'s flickering electro-funk melodies. Elsewhere, the duo adds murmuring deadpan vocals to a few tracks, disrupting those drones with DSP misfiring that snaps the listener awake. In all, it's like the band itself woke up from 15 years of sleep and picked up where industrial left off.
