Front Line Assembly
Mechviruses
Artoffact Records
The idea of a remix album for Front Line Assembly’s 2018 video game soundtrack WarMech is a bit strange, to be honest. While very slickly produced by the venerable Vancouver post-industrial act headed by Bill Leeb, the record itself is very much of that EDM-influenced era of FLA, serving as a coda for Jeremy Inkel’s time as a member and co-producer, his tenure cut tragically short by his untimely passing. WarMech is a very good record, although not a particularly characteristic one, being both instrumental and very much a soundtrack in nature.
Then again, there’s a certain mutability to the songs that makes Mechviruses a blank canvas for each remixer, who take the tracks whichever direction feels right. The sheer variety of takes on display is evidence of what can be done with the high-def originals, in forms that feel both akin to the classic Front Line blueprint, and completely foreign to it. Finnish old-school post-industrialists Cardinal Noire inject the Vancouver sound right back into the tweaky bass music of “Heatmap” by using the song’s rubbery melodics as a counterpoint to clangy percussion and shrieked vocals, while new body music act MVTANT play up the rhythm, transforming it from pumping side-chain to funky syncopated electro. Belgian electro-darkwave act ULTRA SUNN rebuild “Mechvirus” into one of their own distinctive dancefloor cuts, complete with the deep-voiced vocals of singer Sam Huge, that close to home approach mirrored by Ayria and Seb Komor’s synthpop version, each fitting the song’s pinging melody into their respective milieu.
Most interesting is how the record’s three separate versions of “Molotov” come out entirely different frpm one another, intersecting but feeling entirely distinct. The version by the unlikely trio of s:cage, Famine and Lys Morke is all broken beats and skittering percussion, with snatches of chanteuse Morke’s voice slipping between the rapidfire glitches and breaks. Meanwhile, Ottawa electro-industrialists Encephalon leverage the track’s existing neon-future textures to create a a full on cyberpunk club banger, adorned with vocoder and complimentary layers of synth and drum programming. Finally, Seeming’s Alex Reed goes full singer-songwriter with his undeniably great tale, pulling out and recontextualizing whole sections and crafting them into an affecting and uplifting anthem. It’s bizarre to consider that one of the best protest songs to come out of the industrial genre in recent years is a remix of a song from a video game soundtrack, but there’s no denying that Reed’s insistence that “Revolution is showing up” strikes a very real chord from the first listen.
Truthfully, the strangeness of Mechviruses as a concept is justified by the breadth of the results. You wouldn’t peg New York post-punkers Bootblacks as a great match for Front Line’s cybernetic aesthetics, but the dubby version of “Force Carrier”, complete with washes of twangy guitar, is such a left turn it’s hard to not to take notice of it, and that’s just one example. It might be Front Line Assembly’s name on the album cover, but make no mistake, this release is about the personalities of the contributing remixers as artists, and the persnality that they bring to the already somewhat outre-for-FLA originals is the draw.
