Altsounds - Alec Empire- Shivers [Album]

The first time I encountered Alec Empire was during the Intelligence And Sacrifice era in which he provided the sound scape of an impending doom that was coming. Think Terminator Salvation but without SKYNET and all that madness.

It helped myself discover the Industrial rock/metal genre and reading interviews with Alec gave the impression of a man that had been through hell with Atari Teenage Riot (which for those that don’t know ended with Alec burnt out, their lead singer Carl having a psychotic episode leading to his suicide and more chaos.)

Suddenly after the small cult success of Intelligence he seemed to disappear off the music radar at least from what I knew until very recently when it was announced that Patrick Wolf had worked with him. My thoughts were that it wasn’t the Alec I remembered back in the teenage years, I mean Patrick Wolf the guy that used strings, choirs on his breakthrough working with Alec just didn’t add up! However I learned that at the same time Alec would also be bringing out a solo record (the record being Shivers) so in a chance to see if he had evolved since 2001 I decided to give this a listen.

To start off, the industrial chaos that had been the mindset for Intelligence has calmed down in a musical sense. The music now has become something that you would expect to hear in the underground rave/dance clubs. At least, in that sense Alec hasn’t decided to go all happy-go-lucky!

*breathes sigh of relief*

The title track and the closer is more of the electronic recordings that the second disc of Intelligence started to show and actually gives you more of the calm before the storm mentality I had known before. The collaboration with Robbie Furze from The Big Pink also surprised me and actually did something that collaborations don’t normally make me do..... and that’s to check the Big Pink out in the future.

In fact, as a companion to Intelligence it seems to be more of a man reflecting on a war but having to still deal with the control by what Alec believes to be ‘vampires’ and he seems ready to carry on. A good album that brings the signs to come on future material that could see him become the European Trent Reznor.

As a postscript though in the case of Patrick Wolf however, consider that it turned out that Alec was working on the first of a double album… about Patrick’s depression, well they say that if it ain’t broke…!