Their debut, I’ve Seen A Way, was a cinematic slab of post-industrial horror; URGH, however, embodies an entirely different kind of cinematic energy. The album shifts its tension: rather than building to heavy drops of noise, songs now move fluidly through them. The Manchester noiseniks, among the most forward-thinking in post-Gilla band noise dance, have made their previous work seem like one long gestation. They now emerge as true post-industrial new flesh. – less Cronenberg, more Ballard. The result is a chromatic entity born from a shimmering nightmarish present.
While texture and tension have always been the band's bread and butter, URGH features a shift in focus. Much of the earlier ambience has been cast aside in favour of blistering blasts of industrial rock, Scott Fair’s guitar work providing sheet metal scrape tension and Albini crunch in equal measure. Underneath it lies drummer Alex Macdougall whose skeletal rhythms drive the tracks with an uncanny industrial dance flair. On single "Cursive" echoes of PiL’s Flowers Of Romance and Einstürzende Neubaten built a hypnotic tension across Fair’s eerie atmospherics. Yet the real sonic shift here is the newfound emphasis of Simon Catling’s synths, no longer a device for texture and noise but rather uncanny melody. Through it the band pull off a series of brilliant acts of sonic acrobatics. "Cursive" transforms midway through into a piece of industrial mutant disco, "Dodecahedron" opens as martial march only to end as a piece of glittering utopian electronica. Even gaps of ambience and minimalist have been replaced by a grooving EBM pulse on tracks like "Life Hex", causing the tension to remain focused but with a distinct dancefloor sensibility. All the shifts lend the album an odd pop sensibility, the tracks flowing like a bizarre dance amongst the scraps of modernity.
Despite these developments, singer Valentine Caufield remains as incensed, vicious, and powerful as ever. Her chaotic French monologues shifting through choppy sprechgesang oof "Try Saying", to distorted rants on "Sevastopol" and even beautiful industrial croons on "A Brighter Tomorrow". Even with a guest feature from the excellent Billy Woods on "Sicko!", Caufield remains the album's guiding light. A screeching siren aching through the nightmarish machine of the bands' industrial soundscapes and the capitalist death trap they scream against. On closer "I’ll Ask Her" Caufield makes the rare move of singing in English to deliver a ravenous rant against sexual violence. Her frenetic delivery aching against the tense percussion to create a pulsating dread that builds to no relief. As the instruments fade into bleak closure she continues, the last word is with everything the band has done always hers.
Mandy, Indiana, for all their experimentation remain a radically direct band. A driving synth-punk crunch crew that bring the ugly images kicking and screaming into the light. Yet on URGH, when the light hits them, they shimmer too. A fresh glittering chromatic beast of shimmering synths and rhythms forged through industrial wreckage.
