Brotherhood Of The Bomb, The - Techno Animal > Reviews > Techno Animal's best.. NOT techno

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Groundbreaking
Lyrics	Standard
Quality and consistency of tracks	Flawless
How does it rate alongside the competition	Good
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Original, addictive, progressive
Disadvantages:	None, though its appeal may be limited

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Firstly, this album's clasification 'techno' is wrong, allthough wholely understandable due to the group's name. Techno animal, stands for technological animal. It is an expiremental hip hop project, created and produced by Kevin Martin (God, The Bug) & Justin 'man of a thousand sounds' Broadrick (Godflesh, Final, Head of david, Jesu, Napalm Death, Ice, etc). Broadrick and Martin originally came from a punk rock background and have worked in many bands and different forms of music, techno animal began as a sideproject in the mid 90's as an outlet for both artist's increasing interest in hip hop music.

For those who are about to turn away after reading the words hip hop, stop right there. This is not a conventional hip hop album per'se and may well appeal to people who are coming from either an electro or rock music background. The songs are built completley from samples, however there is no way you could tell the origin of the sample's as they have been so distorted, twisted and tweaked that they are unrecognisable. Techno Animal's sound could be described as 'dark hop', which was a term coined on the underground a few years ago, generally used to describe bands that are grounded in hip hop culture but use abstractions of noise and focus on building atmosphere rather than traditional funk or soul sampling that traditional hip hop was based on.

This album is essentially what a hip hop record would sound like filtered through industrial music, such as throbbing gristle or skinny puppy. Dark, nasty and with TONS of reverb. For example, cruise-rubberoom is completley driven by an absolutley huge bass line which has so much reverb it could do your speakers some serious damage. The majority of the album is like this, but this is not a one dimensional puppy. No, half the tracks are instrumentals and the other half feature many of underground hip hop's best name's, including sonic sum, anti pop consortium and dalek. The tracks featuring the rappers are genuinely quite forceful and direct, allowing the rappers to show of there different skills. Some are hyper speed mc workouts, others like dalek's are more rhythmical and take on a more spoken word form. Generally though, the mc's unlike on most commercial hip hop records are not produced high in the mix, there just there to add an element of texture, not to dominate. The instrumentals are logically enough, not as direct as the tracks with vocals. Though there focus remains on building soundscapes and a bass heavy atmosphere through the heavy use of reverb. The best comparison I could make would be somewhere in between scorn's deep dub style and dalek's punishing noise influenced hip hop. This album is both simple and complex and utterly compelling. This album is well worth checking out if your looking for something a bit different or if you think all hip hop is mindless pseudo gangster mtv pap, it is not. This is a great example of how inventive and progressive hip hop can be.