The Family Men: CO/DE/TERMINATION
LP/CD/DL
Out now
Swedish industrial titans The Family Men return with a powerful second album, adding funk to their fury. Christopher Lloyd reviews.
Gothenburg’s The Family Men established themselves on the industrial rock scene a few years back with an incendiary set of live shows around the big three Swedish cities before dropping their debut album No Sounds Forever, a dark, murky affair that took all the noise and fury from those live shows and did its best to break both speakers and eardrums alike with it. It was a great album, but I was left unsure whether the band could pull off a follow-up with something different without losing their unique sound. Well, thankfully, I needn’t have worried, as the second difficult album issue has been put firmly to bed with a stern kick in the jaw with the arrival of CO/DE/TERMINATION.
Opening with a volley of furious drumming, The Family Men launch into the pummel mode, which was so heavily exploited on their debut. Walls of keyboard squelch accompany the chaos, creating an intense barrage that unexpectedly opens up in the middle, revealing a melodic passage that pulls the listener deeper in and signals that there is far more to the band than sheer noise and aggression.
It isn’t business as usual though, for on the second track, AOR, The Family Men take a left turn into a much funkier territory, sounding like Killing Joke if Jaz and his merry men had relocated to an industrial disco somewhere in late-80s Chicago. The Youth-like bassline fills in the grooves, and the band’s sound evolves into something sharper, stranger, and undeniably infectious.
Just as that industrial-disco atmosphere settles in, the album pivots again, dragging the listener forward into the early 90s through flashes of Belgian rave and primitive breakbeats, all fused with the kind of angular, individualistic rock that Therapy? were experimenting with on their early Wiija releases. The combination is astonishing, feeling both nostalgic and entirely futuristic at the same time. Robotic beats seize control, pockets of space surrounding noise. It is a subtle but important shift, allowing the album room to breathe without sacrificing intensity.
On Heaven, everything feels fine. Initially, at least. In what at first seems to be the album’s most straightforward moment, something of a relatively standard rock track, The Family Men throw in another curve-grenade in the form of piercing, abrasive electronic screeches and sudden waves of sonic dissonance, slowly building and swirling whilst the band proceeds to dismantle the familiar verse-chorus-verse structure by twisting it into something with far less stability.
The second half of the album sees the noise replaced by a spacious, echo-drenched, dub bassline, somewhat a brief moment of calm before the tension begins to rise once again. The uneasy stillness is soon shattered by the aggressive stop-start assault of stabbing guitars and distorted, furious vocals, every element tightly coiled and snapping back and forth with fury.
On the album’s finale, Noumena, CO/DE/TERMINATION drives toward its conclusion by taking the sound of a Tesla coil crackling into life and making it the rhythm section before a funky bass groove emerges beneath terse, venomous lyrics delivered with fury.
While a full descent into overwhelming noise might have seemed the obvious ending, the record instead eases itself out, leaving the listener with space to fully appreciate just how accomplished a second album The Family Men have managed to pull off.
~
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Words by Christopher Lloyd. Find his Louder Than War archive here.
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