Wiki
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Release Date
2 May 2005
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Length
10 tracks
H. P. Lovecraft inhabited a terrifying world where blankets of Victorian fog concealed the dripping teeth of reptilian demons. His writing brims with death and decay, but, buoyed by a certain old-fashioned stateliness, it avoids cheap gore. Lovecraft’s sense of manners—coupled with the conservative niceties of his characters—made the descent into supernatural violence particularly jarring. By coating his horror with a veneer of civility, Lovecraft deepened the impact of his ghastly visions.
Bronnt Industries Kapital has an affinity for Lovecraft that—conscious or not—surfaces in their music. They too evoke the arcane, and they too avoid the campy goth that plagues seekers of the dark. The duo of Guy Bartell and Nick Talbot birth a strange new creature into the mutant world of electronic music—gaslight horrortronica. Bronnt Industries Kapital weaves tapestries of formal decay and bloody elegance best heard under the full moon.
After a somewhat forgettable opener, “Polaris” really kicks off the album. A stately piano lures the listener in for a fuzzy beat to deliver the kill. The pairing of the two sounds both anachronistic and appropriate. “Valmara 69” is a strong follow-up. Buttressed by a near hip-hop beat, the track bobs along with icy synth stabs from a murderous butler until a bulbous bassline buries the body.
The funereal organ drones of “Brocken” work well enough, but they merely set the stage for the album centerpiece and highlight “Rats in the Walls.” The demented church organ of a corrupted mass reels off arpeggios, spiraling higher to the insistent fuzzclaps of the dark congregation. An eerie shifting atmosphere settles as the beat fades, and as a high-pitched whine emerges, the organist abandons his post to begin a bizarre electropolka. The assembly whirls to the music for a minute until the song cascades into an Autechran flurry of beats to drive the gathered to frenzied bloodshed.
The second half of the album sometimes seeks to be too elegant for its own good, sacrificing the fantastic beatwork of the first half for staid studies in ambience, but it too contains some highlights. The ghostly moans and desolate swamp-guitar twang of “Maggots in the Rice” (OK, so sometimes the imagery does go a bit too far) succeeds as a study in ambience, and the railroad churning and lonely keyboards of “Sunken Gardens” will sink into your saddest dreams.
With Virtute et Industria, Bronnt Industries Kapital has created a soundtrack to a film that needs to be produced: a post-modern cyborg vampire tale set in the stinking streets of industrial London. Sherlock Holmes sleuths, pipe in hand, while cyberpunks blaring electro from boomboxes snicker behind his back. Fresh spilt blood mingles with muddy footprints on the cobblestone as a soot-blacked population trudges to and from work. In this city, lingering fear takes the form of a roiling, oily fog that covers victim, attacker, and crime. Beware…
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