Front Line Assembly – Caustic Grip

Caustic Grip creates the perfect vision of a cold, dark industrial reality. The album builds a brilliant momentum through songs that favour a razor-sharp mechanical beat structure interspersed with staccato bass/synth lines and strings occasionally layered on top of that. It's quite a dark and aggressive album also, vocals are more in the agitated/aggressive spectrum than any of their other works and it all comes together so perfectly in mixing dark atmosphere with a highly technical stucture. I can't think of anything that comes close to this one in of capturing those same elements.

In my opinion, this is FLA's first solid release (comparing the ratings will corroborate this). With Caustic Grip, Fulber and Leeb found their stride and their sound, and this record gave everyone a nice sneak preview of the long, prolific career the band would have in front of them. All the releases before this one were a bit too old school sounding (i.e. cheesy) for my tastes. Because the available equipment was becoming more advanced around this time, everything that preceded CG was limited in the musical level it could achieve. For reference sake, FLA's pre-CG material reminded me of Suicide Commando's demos, or very early Leaether Strip - both of which were also limited in the same sense. On CG, the sound quality was greatly improved over anything that came before it, as were the lyrics and the music itself. This record paved the way for the timeless classic Tactical Neural Implant, and even though TNI completely blew CG out of the water, the success of the former owes a lot to the formula that FLA uncovered on Caustic Grip.