Genre: Psychedelic Industrial
Track Listing:
01 Intro
02 Destiny = Doom
03 What is Your Way?
04 Our Part = Frame
05 Dream Trauma
06 Melting Chaos
07 Useless Breed Part 1
08 Useless Breed Part 2
09 Torture Chamber
10 Blind and Useless
11 Inevitable Essence
12 D-Evil Flesh
13 Deform Form
14 Deplore With Despair
Symmetry of Asymmetry are the latest band to provoke a philosophical reflection of the dichotomy between the stoic exterior of the average Northern European and the tortured, repressed souls that lie within these silent hulks. Scandinavians, Germanic peoples, Slavs like Czechs, Poles and Russians all seem to have a gruff exterior and whenever an emotion threatens to break through the façade, it’s drowned with vodka, mostly.
But in the art that is produced by these self-same people you can see that they are not the automatons or emotionless rocks they make themselves out to be on the exterior. From the music and imagination of Grieg, to artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, the angry, polemics of Nietzsche, to Ibsen, Chekhov and Turgenev, up through today’s modern cathartic music like KMFDM or Einsturzende Neubauten, to the dark, black-metal bands that notoriously abound in Norway, there is a thread that runs through these disparate-seeming names and monikers: they are all Northern European, they vent their repressed emotions through their art - whether it’s opera, painting, sculpture, music or any kind of modern artforms, people such as the new Symmetry of Asymmetry rip their tortured, mangled souls out of their guts and nail it on the wall for all to see and, if they so desire, interpret them.
The Latvian band, Symmetry of Asymmetry have just put out their debut album, Useless Breed on Sturm Recordings, a sort of shady-seeming organization; hard to find info on the internet about them, but hey, what’re you going to do, huh? The website given at the bottom of the CD cover reads a website url: www.sturm.lv But either the site is currently being worked on or it is a wrong number, to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Anyway, the music on Useless Breed is spectacular, especially for a debut. As was mentioned earlier, KMFDM comes to mind when listening to this CD, from that aggro-beat and a dark, metallic, nihilistic synth-backed kick in the teeth. The only difference here is that Symmetry of Asymmetry don’t use the guitars mixed in with the techno musical backdrops like KMFDM did. I wouldn’t go so far as to compare them to Ministry. Nobody’s like Al Jourgainsen. He is a man by himself. And now clean, I hear too, which is nice. But, I mean, he’s got the humor, the musical aptitude and the skills to put them together and some talented buddies in the guise of Paul Barker, Luc Van Acker, Chris Connelly and it was great when he did that “Lard” record with Jello Biafra and two other dudes, but those two together was a blast.
All through the first six tracks of Useless Breed are fast, no-holds-barred smacks in the face, rat-a-tat-tat-tat. Then all of a sudden you hit track seven, which just happens to be part one of the title track (two parts). It’s a slowed down, kind of sad, reflective tune, instrumental - or mostly, there are a few printed lyrics for “Useless Breed” but it doesn’t read which part that they are in. Really, though, it’s a rather seamless segueway from Part One to Part Two. Yes, you can definitely differentiate the two, after about a minute or less of slow buildup, Part Two becomes a more edgy, heavier tune and here comes the scream-o lyrics, piped through a studio filter to hide the accent, no doubt. Haha, just kidding; but seriously, it’s a darkly tour de force that’s gut-wrenching, cathartic, or just plain annoying, depending on your tastes. But if you were a big fan of most Wax Trax! bands, you’ll no doubt dig these guys and their debut.
Track 10, “Blind and Useless” starts off with this dark poetic reading by an older guy, kind of like when Vincent Price did that little schtick on that Iron Maiden tune, remember? But then it kicks in and has, besides its marching beat, a dance-inducing swirl of riffs and synth tangents.
Of course, to lure in that all-important younger generation, they have that “satanic” sort of appeal - the black everywhere, the nihilism, the just plain eeriness to church-going old people and it comes off in a nicely artistic way, not schlock or gimmicky. They really do seem to follow their own muse, despite maybe sounding like so-and-so here or there, it all gets amalgamated into a new thing, Symmetry of Asymmetry.
