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Emigrate - Silent So Long
Published by: Spinefarm Records
Published on: December 9th, 2014.
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Emigrate hail from Germany and were formed by Rammstein's Richard Kruspe. In 2007 they released their first and until now only album, a self titled collection of twelve tracks all performed in English (as opposed to his work with Rammstein). In addition to playing guitar, this time around Kruspe also does the vocals and he's joined in the band by Olsen Involtini on rythm guitar, Arnaud Giroux on bass and Mikko Sirén and Joe Letz (of Combichrist) on drums. Additionally, there are some interesting guest contributors that pop up on various tracks, but more on that as we get to it.
The complete track listing for Silent So Long is:
Eat You Alive / Get Down / Rock City / Hypothetical / Rainbow / Born On My Own / Giving Up / My Pleasure / Happy Times / Faust / Silent So Long
So yeah, the album opens up with Eat You Alive, which features Frank Dellé from Germany's Seeed. It's a catchy riff-heavy track with a chanting 'hey hey hey' over the chorus that'll get you moving. It's almost dancey in spots, but not at the cost of the song's 'weight' and it sets the course that the rest of the album is going to follow. The second track, Get Down, is more interesting. Why? Well, Peaches does the vocals on it - yep, the woman who brought you Fuck The Pain Away shows up here to croon over a track that could very easily have come off of a KMFDM album from the mid-nineties. All of a sudden as this plays I'm having flashbacks to college! Her vocals really work here though. She's got a sultry, sexy thing going on with the way she sings here and it's pretty cool and her work contrasts with portions of the vocals handled by Kruspe. We even get a weird sort of noodly sounding guitar solo over this one. I can dig it.
A selling point for this album and a big reason that a lot of people are going to want to check it out, however, is for track three: Rock City. Why? Because none other than Motorhead's own Lemmy Kilmister handles lead vocals on this track. It's a fast, heavy and driving track, the kind that you'd expect Lemmy to offer up on his own but we get this sort of strange, very German sounding industrial backbone to it that makes it more than just 'a song that sounds like a Motorhead track.' It's pretty cool and while you might not think his gravelly voice would work over something like this, you'd be wrong.
Hypothetical and Rainbow both circle back and have more in common with the sound established on the opening track: grinding guitars and catchy bass lines. Marilyn Manson does the vocals on Hypothetical and as you'd probably guess, his style fits in here quite well as Emigrate's sound definitely has more than a little bit in common with a lot of Manson's own work. Born On My Own starts off slowly, some keyboards and a mellow bass line behind the vocals, but it starts to build around the one minute mark and it finishes up in a pretty bombastic way, while Giving Up has this sort of techno-ish intro but gives that up as it segues into heavier territory while still remaining very electronic sounding - it's sure to be a hit at all the dance clubs!
One of the most 'fun' cuts on the record is My Pleasure, and again it sounds like throwback to the mid-nineties where songs like this were popular all over the place. It's not industrial in the grinding sense but it's heavier than you'd consider pop or dance music to be. Happy Times and Faust bring us closer to the album's finish, the first track being more of a slow, droning number with some female backing vocals making it stand out a bit, and the latter a faster and more 'metal' sounding number.
The last track on the album, the title track, is a sort of mid-tempo track, not blisteringly fast or heavy but the guitars do get up front in the mix every time the chorus kicks in. It's a slick and well produced mix of industrial and metal with some trance style bits thrown in to keep things interesting. Jonathan Davis of Korn does some guest vocals on this and while I'm not personally a Korn fan, he's got a strong voice and his work on this track fits it quite well. You can kind of hear the Korn influence here too, as well as maybe some Nine Inch Nails working its way into the song.
Seriously, this whole thing sounds like it came out of a recording studio about twenty years ago. It's got that same sort of Rammstein-esque guitar sound, which makes sense, but there is a whole lot of KMFDM and Bi-God 20 style industrial danceteria stuff going on here. It's all ridiculously overproduced and chock full of all the goofy clichés you'd expect from something like this but damn it all if it isn't a lot of fun. Slap on some eyeliner and some leather pants, wax your chest and shave the sides of your head and get into it!
Check out this album teaser video....
...and while you're at it, the video for Eat You Alive!
