Combichrist: album reviews and ratings

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	Combichrist Andy LaPlegua & Co

Artist Listing:

S - Z

CombiChrist is the new electro/industrial side project from Icon of Coil vocalist Andy LaPlegua. It presents very hard edged EBM/industrial in the vein of other top Out Of Line acts such as Dulce Liquido, Hocico, and Soman. Pummeling dancefloor grooves and distorted beats combine with scathing vocals and electro arrangements to produce a full-tilt dancefloor onslaught.

Combichrist Discography - Album / CD Reviews

2003: The Joy of Gunz (EP)
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2004: Sex, Drogen & Industrial (EP)
"Icon of Coil´s mastermind, Andy LaPlegua, manages to take his project Combichrist to totally new dimensions with this EP-release. Previously, the name stood synonymous for electronic industrial sounds in their most brutal incarnation. Whereas 'Sex, Drogen und Industrial' at first continues on this path with the opening track, Blut Royale, the listener soon begins to grasp as to where the LaPlegua will take him on his journey: more electro, less distortion, yet nonetheless energetic and aggressive. Track two, programmatically titled Tractor tramples you with thudding electronic sounds and it is hard to find a proper category for this energetic wave of mutilation. The best term for this new form of pure, unrestricted musical energy would be Techno-EBM, as it combines the straight rhythmicality of Techno with the brute force of EBM. While provocative samples and aggressive sounds remain an integral part of the Combichrist-universe, the wind blows in the direction of pure electronic madness. 'Sex, Drogen und Industrial' is a musical inferno that will shake and rock any club floor. Listening to the tracks, one is almost able to smell the sweat of twitching bodies. This EP whets the appetite for things to come and LaPlegua proves that he is able to create something that is ground breaking in the pure sense of the word with Combichrist. He takes no prisoners and no one can escape – what remains are the remnants of musical destruction and exhausted corpses scattering the dancefloor. "

-- press release

¾ 2005: Everybody Hates You
"Combichrists reaches out with menacing claws to assimilate trance style beats to its darker electro industrial purposes. Using these, CombiChrist's 'Everybody Hates You' obtains its pulsing, shooting dance drive, becoming a flying, electrified sword blade to the heart, charging the skewered's body into a frenzy of dancefloor evil. Fused onto this is electro distortion and minimalist melody. Next in the mix are multiple vocals. Sometimes, as in the dance attitude meets electro postmodern neuvo nihilism This Shit Will Fcuk You Up, you get attitude filled female vocals. At other times you get aggro male vox, such as in Blut Royale, which eschews the trance beats that began the CD and utilizes potent industrial pulsing. One of my favorite tracks on this is God Bless, which uses a slowed down variation on gabber beats and rattles off a list of serial killers, etc., those the song wishes God would bless. Dark danceworthiness with the most sneeringly evil attitude. "

-- Kristofer Upjohn , Raves.com

2007: WTF is Wrong with you People?
Tracklisting: 01. Five AM Afterparty 02. What The Fuck Is Wrong With You 03. Electrohead 04. Adult Content 05. Fuck That Shit 06. Brain Bypass 07. Get Your Body Beat 08. Deathbed 09. In The Pit 10. Shut Up And Swallow 11. Red 12. Are You Connected 13. Give Head If You Got It 14. All Your Bass Belongs To Us

"Listen, you fucking cunt' commands the intro, and listen you shall. It's difficult to do anything but. 'What the Fuck is Wrong With You People?' is in your face from the word go. There's nothing melodious about what's on offer here. I imagine that if robots had raves - held in the still-churning bowls of rusting industrial factories – this is what they'd sound like. There's mechanical precision in every beat. Adult Content sounds like an automated production line: hammers striking, drill-bits whirring, pistons pumping, steam hissing. Brain Bypass is like experiencing the first 'waking' moments of a glitching android, with its bizarre stuttered sampling on the hyper-efficiency of robots and, confusingly, the destructive effects of cocaine. You just have to look at the track titles to see the man-machine connection. The lyrics follow accordingly, all primitive, violent and sexual – particularly on tracks like Give Head if You Got It. Deathbed descends deeper into the depraved darkness, with some gothic synths and background screeches that sound – appropriately – like mechanized death rattles. In the Pithas a bit of a 'Pretty Hate Machine' vibe, and like Deathbed uses LaPlegua's undistorted voice – which is sadly not quite as impressive or punchy as the stop-start chopped vocals on tracks like Electrohead and Are You Connected. Formed to sit at the opposite end of the electronic spectrum to Icon of Coil, it's to be expected that Combichrist shouldn't be so dance floor friendly. There are still moments of club-friendly excellence, however for every one of these tracks there's another that is neither potential club hit nor power-noise assault, stuck in some ungainly middle ground."

-- Jenny, scenepointblank.com, 3/07

2008: Frost EP: Sent to Destroy
Tracklisting: 1. Sent To Destroy 2. The Kill (Instru:mental Version) 3. Prince Of E-ville 4. Sent To Destroy (Rotersand Remix) 5. Sent To Destroy (Northborne Remix) 6. Sent To Destroy (Suicide Commando 7. Prince Of E-ville (Babyland Remix) 8. Prince Of E-ville (Accessory Remix 9. Prince Of E-ville (Caustic Remix)

"If you were hoping for an EP on par with 'Get Your Body Beat' or 'Sex, Drogen Und Industrial', you’re not going to get it here. Sent to Destroy is a decent track, exactly what you would expect of a Combichrist release. The Kill (Instrumental Version) has more energy and appeal than the other non-remix tracks, which either makes this one hell of an instrumental, or is just very telling of the other tracks. Prince of E-Ville sports a vocal performance that might have been delivered right after Andy LaPlegua rolled out of bed. And the beats sound like they were lifted directly from This Shit Will Fuck You Up. There are six remixes here. Rotersand strips Sent to Destroy, making it more powerful than the original. Babyland’s remix of Prince of E-Ville slows the track down, giving it interest and helping it to actually work."

-- Angie Pardue, theyfell.blogspot.com, 7/08

¾ 2009: Today We Are All Demons
Tracklisting: 01. No Afterparty 02. All Pain is Gone 03. Kickstart The Fight 04. I Want Your Blood 05. Can't Change The Beat 06. Sent To Deastroy 07. Spit 08. New Form Of Silence 09. Scarred 10. The Kill V.2 11. Get Out of My Head 12. Today We Are All Demons 13. At The End Of It All
"This album is terrible overall. Many of the songs are dancy and kinda fun, for about 2 minutes. Most of them are indistinguishable from each other, and once you've listened to the first track, you've heard every sound they use in the album, with the exception of the bizarre hidden track, being inaccessibly the album's best. The lyrics are beyond stupid, and Andy's voice sounds horrible, badly produced, and out of place to the music. It's as if they record the entire album instrumentally, then have him scream something moronic that fits the title of the song."

-- codexwyrm "Tony", amazon customer review

½ 2010: Making Monsters
Tracklisting: 01. Declamation 02. Follow The Trail Of Blood (featuring Brandon Schiepatti of Bleeding Through) 03. Never Surrender 04. Throat Full of Glass 05. Fuckmachine 06. Forgotten 07. Just Like Me 08. Slave To Machine 09. Through These Eyes of Pain 10. Monster:Murder:Kill 11. They 12. Reclamation

"It's a good thing this band has a strong back catalogue, because otherwise this album would be invisible in the mountain of similar generic, unremarkable electronic music made by newbies. I'm sorry, but this is just not good Combichrist. Many of the songs are slow, plodding messes without any hooks or contagious sounds. Not interesting, not powerful, not threatening, just as bland as sonic hands-full of dough. Andy has an awful singing voice--it's weak, it's very much out of tune, and yet he tries and tries to sing on so many tracks! Andy's voice is made for industrial-strength shouting, like in Sent to Destroy and All Pain is Gone--THOSE are killer songs. Andy's sounding more tired here. There are a few stabs of harder songs, but they're not actually very interesting. F---machine is an un-creative as they come: heap misogyny and abuse on a woman, tell her she deserves it--that's the whole song. It's crap. It's trite. It's not rebellious, it's typical woman-hating sexism without even the benefit of any interesting music (just a bunch of loops piled on top of each other...).

-- WichacpiHoskila, amazon.com customer reviews, 10/10

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Recommended Links:

The Official Combichrist web site
Combichrist on myspace