Posts tagged "industrial"

The Tea Party - Transmission

The Tea Party are a band that throughout their career, have continually managed to reinvent their sound, while retaining the core components of blending a rock mentality with world music.

Transmission sits squarely in the middle of their career, and is probably the most different album they’ve ever done.  Much darker in sound and theme than anything they’ve done before or since, Transmission is their classic eastern rock sound, as filtered through the gothic industrial style of Nine Inch Nails.

While in the 5 years following the release of NIN’s “The Downward Spiral” there were almost countless copycats with bands like Filter, Stabbing Westward, and Gravity Kills, The Tea Party’s offering to the genre stands out from the rest due to its impeccable vocals, and middle eastern influences, as evident on the intro to the opening track “Temptation”.

While the album starts off fairly straight-forward with “Temptation”, which is as made-for-radio as industrial gets, the highlights of this album for me are the incredible slow-build of “Psychopomp”, which really shows off Jeff Martin’s amazingly powerful and soulful voice; the eastern rock vibe of “Gyroscope”, and the experimental beats of “Transmission”.  The piano interlude at the end of “Babylon” also deserves a mention.

Shortly after this album they released a DVD with many of the songs being performed on a music tv program, and while this would have been perfect video footage of a great band at their peak, the sound mix is unfortunately quite terrible, and much of the guitar punch is lost in the mix.

I recommend this to anyone who doesn’t mind embracing their dark side on occasion :)

http://www.myspace.com/theteaparty

NIN|JA 09 EP

http://www.ninja2009.com/

I’ll start by saying I’m a huge NIN fan, liked rage and a lot of Audioslave, and never really got into Jane’s Addiction. This free EP contains 2 tracks from NIN, JA, and Streetsweeper (tom morello’s new project), who are about to start an 09 tour together.

The Streetsweeper tracks sound like a mix of sub-rage riffs, with saul williams style vocals over the top.  I think the rhythm section of rage added a lot to the band, and this lacks a bit in that department.  I do prefer it to the other tom morello projects I’ve heard lately, but I probably wont listen to it that much.  That being said, the intro riff in the “Clap for the killers” is really bizarre and I actually love it.

The first NIN track, “Not so pretty now” reminds me a little of Echoplex, and sounds like its most likely a b-side from The Slip sessions (and to me, all of The Slip sounded like B-sides from ghosts and with teeth).  Its a pretty average NIN song overall I think.  The second track “Non-entity” is a bit better, but pretty much sounds like an off-key version of “The line begins to blur”.

I’ve left the Janes Addiction tracks till last because I’m not that familiar with their sound, but I think both their tracks are actually my picks from the whole EP.  I’m not a fan of the vocals, but the first track “Chip away” has a really punchy tribal drum rhythm driving it that kept me interested, and there’s some great guitar work in “Whores”.

On the whole, can’t complain for free, but I hope to get something more up to the quality of Fragile/Downward spiral era NIN in the future.  Hopefully the break from touring will give him a bit more time to experiment.