Stuart Bruce from Chain D.L.K reviews Angelspit’s 2017 album ‘Black Dog Bite’
Angelspit: Black Dog Bite
Posted by Stuart Bruce (@) Electronics / EBM / Electronica
cover Artist: Angelspit
Title: Black Dog Bite
Format: CD + Vinyl
Label: Black Pill Red Pill
Angelspit’s seventh album is a set of twelve tightly-produced, relentless and noisy slices of electro-EDM-rock full of glitched guitars, thumping drum machines, dirty sharp fills, gutpuncher kicks and distorted shouty vocals. It’s a fairly familiar set-up that will appeal to fans of Blue Stahli, Celldweller and the like.
While much of the vocal is one-note stuff (“V Is For Voltage” a prime example), there’s also an underlying strong sense of melody that shows through in tracks like “Sexy Tragic Muse”. “Post Truth Wonderland” acts as though it’s ashamed to be almost synthpop.
Black Dog Bite LP cover
The lyrics are also mostly a notch above the stereotypes of the genre, breaking out of the insular and angry into wider themes of politics, social media and so on, some but not all of the time. Unusually clear vocal treatment, avoiding the deliberate muddiness other acts prefer, let the lyrics shine through and they’ve been thought through. Some tracks, like achingly obvious anti-capitalist rant “Great Bank In The Sky” (“make money, and then you die”) and the on-the-nose anti-Trump “Dead Man Talking”, take this one step further in a way that you begin to suspect might be both furious and slightly tongue-in-cheek at the same time.
The surprisingly funky “Bang Bang Bang” is a good example of the high production values at play- playful and energetic and carefully mapped out. Seven albums in, Angelspit clearly know what they’re doing in production terms.
This is a way-above-average example of electro-metal done well and is absolutely worth the price of admission. If you also happen to be feeling impotent fury at international politics, then this may strike a chord on other levels too.
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