I'll cut to the chase: this is absolutely incredible. I mean staggering, mind-blowing. Melding electronica and industrial / metal within an avant-garde / experimental framework, while also incorporating delicate passages of acoustic instrumentation, this is the kind of album that not everyone is going to get or appreciate, but ought to hear regardless.
The seven tracks on 'IIRON' are all instrumental and all epic, with an average running time around the six-minute mark. Not that a track's length is necessarily a measure of anything other than passing time, but the durations are integral to the formation here, allowing space for the atmospheric grooves to build. A serpentine guitar motif entwines with a crunching, distorted mechanised beat on 'Red Square,' before a sludgy riff, thick with distortion, changes the texture without breaking the tension. It sets the tone for the rest of the album perfectly, from the dark ambient rumblings that mark the dawn of the mangled drone metal monster that is 'War End War' to the heavy chug and distortion overload of 'Fist of Glory'. 'IIRON' is one heavy and seriously dark album, but it's also powerful and highly original.
There are moments on 'All Lights Are Fire' that sound like a NIN remix of Fudge Tunnel, but then it takes sharp turn into Depeche Mode vs Aphex Twin remixed by Throbbing Gristle territory. The beauty of 'IIRON' is that it never lets the listener get too comfortable, always confounds expectations, while at the same time building a real groove, albeit in a grinding techno / industrial vein.
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For all this, COH manage to avoid becoming corny at any time. Much as I like bands like KMFDM and Mussolini Headkick and many of the releases on Wax Trax! from the late 80s and early 90s, I find some of the dancier, more overtly electro numbers rather cringe-inducing, the whole 'EBM' thing being too Euro-disco for my tastes. 'IIRON' is far heavier than anything that any of the aforementioned bands have released, and draws from a much broader sonic spectrum, incorporating elements as diverse as drone / doom metal and glitchtronica within the same soundspace.
It's an outstanding album, and quite unlike any other I've heard. I bet the vinyl sounds even more amazing.
COH on MySpace
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