ACUMEN NATION - Psycho The Rapist

Digging deep through the industrial leftovers still in circulation, one might stumble upon “Psycho The Rapist”, the eighth effort by American outfit Acumen Nation. The man behind the music is Jason Novak, an instrumentalist and producer who's been rooted in the Chicago scene since the late Eighties. Once you look into the band's discography, it becomes fairly clear that there's an attempt here to shift the genre's formal center of gravity away from the usual dependence on Al Jourgensen and Trent Reznor. That alone makes it worth a listen. Acumen Nation's industrial metal sinks its claws into drum'n'bass and hardcore.

And yet, the recipe of “Psycho The Rapist” risks falling into déjà vu right from the opening bars, reloaded with content that already feels dated. "Fanglorius" is overly pretentious, bloated in its electronic programming, and ends up sinking into conventional post-core arrangements. Along the same lines, the overreaching cacophonies of "Hatchet Harry" fail to lift its gratuitous sensationalism out of mediocrity. For a better sense of dramatic cohesion, you have to wait for the "Sirvix"-"No Imagination" pairing: the cinematic dialogue, the brutality of the guitars combined with the ambient amplification of the whole thing, bring to mind Today Is The Day meeting Aphex Twin.

"Remedial Math" translates the heaviness of Meshuggah into a cold, mathematical techno, even if the chorus dissolves into pure punk violence. The change of skin stirred up by the percussiveness of "Idle Lisergic Corpse" relieves the accumulated rage and is surprisingly danceable, though it soon slips into the banal.

The album fizzles out by forcibly repeating the same clichés over the final ten minutes of "Acumen Trapanation", a summary encyclopedia of their influences and a burst of cosmic radiation that puts an end to any further discussion.

Gathering up the flaws of today's industrial music, the Acumen Nation's output does no harm to the surrounding wasteland.

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10/11/2007