For the most part, Cyber or Industrial Death Metal has a pretty rigid formula: Beefy, chunky guitars, mechanical pounding drums and the odd whirr or beep and sample here and there with some growled vocals. The Netherlands’ Empire of the Scourged, while generally following those paradigms also manage to changes things up a bit on their noisy, 25 minute debut EP.

The 5 songs contained on the EP are a more brutal, atonal take of cyber metal with less predictable, chunky-ness and a more distorted, deconstructive sound. The samples and cyber synths are more quirky and discordant, as are the riffs. Like a robot gone haywire or faulty wiring leading to a cacophony of off key beeps and hums, the songs are far more chaotic then most of there brethren, but it works.

Tracks like “Hollow Machinations of the Foul Spirited” , “Foul Machinations of a Hollow Spirit”  and “Trapped in This Massive Process”  (with its pounding programmed drum break) sound like HAL ( 2001: A Space Odyssey) or Mother (Alien) going ballistic and having a techno rave while brutal goregrind plays in the back ground. It’s quite disconcerting, but certainly unique and occasionally a ethereal, robotic female voice chimes in adding to the disconnected brutally. Closer ” A Scarred Horizon” is a six minute track that reigns things in a bit into  more traditional structured cyber/industrial death metal but is still riddled with off kilter programming and shattering glass synths.

While most cyber metal has this clinical, futuristic, sheen and robotic hum and pace, Empire of the Scourged has rendered a more dystopian sound of rust, decay and technology run amok.

[Visit the band's website]

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