Vampire Rodents
Gravity’s Rim (Fifth Column)
by Lex Marburger
When a band with a familiar label and a familiar-sounding name suddenly catches me off guard with a new take on an aging style, I sit up and take notice. When a band such as Vampire Rodents crosses my path, and visually and mentally sets me up for a fall (c’mon. “Vampire Rodents?” Please), and then startles me out of my cynicism, I have to give credit where it’s due. Gravity’s Rim obviously falls into the niche of electro-industrial. But wait! There’s so much that overflows the simplistic stereotypes of that often-misused word. When the creators (including members of Chemlab, Spahn Ranch, and Battery) take a tired genre and infuse it with odd samples, energetic grooves, and melody lines lifted from Middle Eastern ideas, I have to get exited. Someone’s creating new sounds within a previously existing context! This is the cross-pollination that I long for, to see what new births emerge from a melding of existing ideas. The electro-industrial basis is inescapable, but instead of wallowing in the “depressing techno” aspect, they move into adding soundtrack samples, horns, funk beats, and layer upon layer of creativity. Granted, the vocals and eventual output are what’s expected of an industrial band these days, but that doesn’t stop Gravity’s Rim from being a crystallizing seed in an otherwise dreary form of music. Even when Maria from Battery takes a turn at singing (I don’t think I’ll ever forgive her for that version of “Gangsta’s Paradise”), the music is enough to subvert her voice from ordinary to mysterious. It shifts underneath her vocals to turn her melodies into discordant, atonal lines that disturb and provoke. The vocals (enigmatic yet depressing) are all but lost on initial listenings to Gravity’s Rim. What attracts instead is the method of delivery and the surrounding textures, which give an unsettling yet strangely holistic feeling to the CD. Their intent seems to be a negation, or at least an expansion, of the industrial sound. Much more active and frenetic sampling is employed (though nowhere near as intricate as, say, Download), adding a sense of chaos and newness. Not staying put with one or two samples incorporated into a formulaic sound, they add all sorts of intriguing and hectic samples into their mix, giving the entire album a freshness, and newness. Even if Vampire Rodents goes nowhere, if you have this album in your collection, you’ll see the debts future “successes” will have to Gravity’s Rim.
