Track of the Morning 22-2-10: Dismantled – Human

If the Terminator decided to give up killing things and made records instead, Dismantled’s first album would’ve been the result. In all my years of listening to hardcore electro, industrial, and terror EBM, nothing has quite captured that same mechanised post-apocalyptic feel; sure Xentrifuge sound like the cybernetic apocalypse, but that’s the actual war against the machines. Xentrifuge’s pure, uncompromising electronic hatred sounds more like the Judgement Day war than the sound track to humanity being rounded up and exterminated in a scorched-sky, blackened post apocalyptic world, and that’s the image I get from Dismantled’s first album.

‘Human’ is the perfect example of the sound on this album; you’ve got a stomping, militaristic beat, overarching, doom-laden keyboards and Gary Zon’s vocorder-drenched voice combined with a bunch of human screams and samples from war films. All in all, it sounds like the musical equivalent of those futuristic parts of the Terminator films and I love it.

Unfortunately, subsequent Dismantled albums moved away from the cyborg sound of the first and the group became a more generic sounding EBM band. I tried to listen to their later albums, but none of them had the same degree of impact that this one did to me. It’s a shame that the Dismantled sound changed so dramatically, but at least I’ll always have this album and Human to help me out when I want to hear a good old fashioned T-800 stomp.