Thought Industry – Black Umbrella – Review

Thought Industry

Black Umbrella (Metal Blade)
by Austin Nash

I played this for my lady friend. She’s a sweet leftover seventies girl from the city, and she said: “This is nice, it’s pretty.” And I thought, sounds like crap to me. But crap don’t sound, baby, and that’s when my jaw hit the floor.

Thought Industry is a personal thing with me. I’ve been hearing them play for close to ten years. TI was the first band that made me realize a band could get out of Kalamazoo, MI. When they made their first album,Songs For Insects, I questioned the material because I had been hearing it for so long. It was old. Then I realized that it was old to only 100 of us in Kzoo, and they had gotten out. Dag…

I remember seeing videotape of the band that evolved into Thought Industry making spectacle of Brent Oberlin in zebra-striped pants shredding from top and bottom of the neck on bass, and drummer Dustin Donaldson, who was kicked out in ’95 for not helping putting… helping out, looking like Lars Ulrich as usual. The band was Goth/industrial/tech-metal to the bone, a persona which carried through on a more refined level on Songs For Insects. Then the band turned toward the crowd a bit with Mods Carve The Pig: Assassins, Toads, and Godsflesh, some songs holding over from the development years but a definite progression out of the industry and into melody and a cleaner cut stone. The 1996 release,Outer Space is Just a Martini Away, threw just about every fan, knocked them over like a flag on the giant slalom, only to bounce right back for a second time. It wasn’t metal, it wasn’t alternative, it wasn’t experimental, it was the perfect step up and away from Outer Space, just as Outer Space was from Songs For Insects, which is why I am pleasantly appeased by Black Umbrella, rather than surprised.

Black Umbrella will be, as usual, a bit difficult for the die-hard TI fan to swallow. There is little or no rock to the album, though it still harbors the same introspective devils present in the past, and good sources assure me its edge is much rougher live which would be good reason for a …live album. It’s a bit more subtle and a bit more violent and penetrating, using sickeningly perfumed virulence to penetrate the listener. This is no light matter. I have listened to Black Umbrella seventeen times, and it took even my finely trained ear (ah-ah-ahhh…) a good 7 or 8 plays, with all insight to benefit, to come face to face with this specter. The production is magnificent, with very little distortion and digital studio trickery. It is pretty. It is deviant. It is a perfect opportunity to slit your wrists over a standard Drambuie, apart from the rigors of news radio and killer traffic. You can fuck to it, drink to it, declare a point of grave creation, sit in exile under fist over lecture, or just stare at a dark wall with a gun in your underwear. It’s there for you.

This huge “metal” band played the Fleet Center here in Beantown, and of course the dipshit chosen to speak said: “People were disappointed in us over the years for not repeating Ride The Lightning over and over, but we do what we want, man!!!” Not, of course, to draw anything close to a comparison between the bands, but while the evolutionary road taken by this band truly covers only a decade with its mentality, TI has covered an era in one-third the time.

The most distinguished trait of the band is that while deviant unto itself, it has remained in harmonious concurrence with itself, revealing vast vertical and horizontal displacement from previous ideas as the standard trait, while maintaining an astounding cerebral quality and ability to resituate its listeners with the simple fact that it still provides the same tremendous sustenance with the same indefatigable conviction. Like being anesthetized to near death and brought back happy with a new favorite album. They’ve just got that…