Review Summary: Just another one of those discs that lurk in the racks of secondhand record stores, hiding decent songs under a cracked case and a discount sticker.
More or less forgotten today (aside from a few soundtrack appearances), Arizona natives Machines of Loving Grace fell neatly into the catchier end of the industrial genre. Combining aspects of industrial, post-punk, and alt-rock, their 1991 debut album exhibited a raw but accessible approach comprised of equal parts Killing Joke and My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult.
Opener
Burn Like Brilliant Trash (At Jackie’s Funeral) instantly sets the tone, swaggering out of the gate with a barrage of programmed drums, trashy guitars, and sneering vocals before riding a slinky bass riff into a vocodered chorus. The rest of the album follows a similar blueprint; samples are numerous and b-grade in origin, female backing vocals wander in and out, and drum machines tick away with an unmistakeably early-90’s feel, all while frontman Scott Benzel croons ragged tales of tabloid Americana and technicolour apocalypse, pausing now and then for excursions into string-laden acoustic balladry (
Cicciolina, which, in best industrial form belies its emotive cellos with lyrics about a porn star) and unconvincing pseudo-funk (
Content).
Although the industrial aesthetic is fully realised and firmly in place, the foundation that it’s laid over has some unfortunate weaknesses. Tracks like
Rite Of Shiva and
X-Insurrection don’t shy away from catchy hooks that resolve into equally catchy choruses, but it’s there that the songwriting hits a wall; most of the tracks feature awkward transitions and bridges that feel like uninspired placeholders just flailing around until the song resolves back into a final chorus.
Aside from the flawed songwriting, there’s one major drawback that hinders the albums impact, and that’s the production. Released in 1991, the album easily sounds as though it was recorded five years earlier, the result of Mammoth Records infamously refusing to let the band re-record their original 8-track demos, instead issuing them in the form of this album. The end result is a double-edged sword; while some tracks benefit from the tacky lo-fi feel, the likes of
Weatherman and
Terminal City end up as examples of otherwise fine songwriting buried under cheap and dated sounds that wouldn’t be out of place in a Sega Genesis game from the same period.
In the end, this isn’t an album that will change the way you look at the world. Like many debut albums, it remains most interesting today for the glimpses it shows of what the band would later become; the talent was there, but it would take the addition of a full-time drummer and a considerable refinement in sound and songwriting before they would make further headway. Nevertheless, this debut still stands as an interesting (if ragged and occasionally lacklustre) introduction to a band which few people today remember.
