Frontline Assembly* – Artificial Soldier

This was mostly a great album, but it was marred by horrible mastering. This hindered the replay value, as it was fatiguing to listen to.

Front Line Assembly, over the years, had steadily been on one of the most remarkable musical progressions of any act in the industry. It began on Millennium, as a hard, guitar-driven metal/industrial amalgamation that would spawn many similar groups (especially Hanzel Und Gretyl), and dissolved all the way down through Implode, Epitaph, and the unheralded masterpiece Civilization into a kind of euphoric, lethargic ethereal-industrial mixture. After Civilization, FLA had tested the waters so thoroughly and authoritatively that all they had left to do was start over.

That's what Artificial Soldier is. It is Front Line Assembly realizing that it has nothing left to do musically except fill its role and deliver one hell of a record. It's reminiscent of Metallica's journey in the 1980's from hard-line metal band, to progressive anthemic metal band, and back. Like that Black Album, every track on Artificial Soldier is an entity unto itself. Bill Leeb just has fun, making industrial the way he did all through the '80s, but with the technological fixation of Epitaph. The synths therefore don't run together in sound like they did during his earlier works, and Artificial Soldier stands up with the best of those pioneering works. Because it does not cover any new musical ground, like Civilization or Millennium did, it can hardly be considered a masterpiece, but it is one of FLA's strongest albums from start to finish; Artificial Soldier is purely and simply the latest in Bill Leeb's long line of industrial monsters.