A Spin on the Genre-Go-Round

For an industrial metal band, Aborym sure do love to play with almost every other style of music besides industrial metal. Compared to their American cousins in Foetus and Nine Inch Nails, Malfeitor Fabban’s self-described “alien-black-hard/industrial” project has always touted less overt angst and more romance and mysticism, less grit and more grandeur, as befits the Italian tradition.

Despite this, Aborym are no pushovers. 2016’s Shifting.negative is a titan of an LP stuffed with every extreme metal style point from blast beats to blues riffs. Album opener “Unpleasantness” creeps in like a foreign plague with piston-like electronic drums and bleating synthesizers that never really take center stage, merely sizzling and crackling in the background in a style representative of the album’s whole. In fact, “Slipping Through The Cracks” stands as the album’s only true industrial song – churning, condensed and squelching. Aborym’s best moments come when they tinge other extreme metal sub-genres with industrial music’s fabricated, perverted essence, in the vein of Strapping Young Lad. “Decadence in a nutshell” is all too fitting a title for a tune that smashes together blistering death metal with a verse that’s both stompy and anthemic enough to fit a Def Leppard single – now, if it only had some vocal melody.

The key difference between Aborym and Devin Townsend’s old outfit is Aborym’s nostalgic clinging to industrial music’s borrowed disco beats. The group tosses bits of danceability back into their abrasive mix at a moment’s notice for that extra layer of disorientation. “You Can’t Handle The Truth” hinges on a lone, insistent Kraftwerk-style keyboard note in the mire. It’s one of Shifting.negative’s more perplexing tracks because it is primarily straight-up, cut-and-paste, MIDI thrash a la Psalm 69-era Ministry (right down to the imitation of Al Jourgenson’s nasally sneer), yet mixed with Jack Nicholson’s famous quote. Things get even weirder with “10050 Cielo Drive,” an indignant, raucous punk basher topped with the type of synth-string arrangements that just might be corny on purpose. Lead singer and lone original member Fabban steals a page from Mike Patton’s book with some low, guttural crooning during a quiet moment in the midst of a blazing metal firestorm. Aborym also emulate Patton’s pension for jamming dramatically contrasting styles up against each other. “For a Better Past” features some southern-fried pedal steel guitar over the clicking and whirring of the ever-looming industrial machine, as well as the groaning, whispery whining that marked the vocal style of so many nu metal frontmen.

Shifting.negative has no shortage of ideas nor lack of ambition, and it’s one hell of a wild, unsettling ride. Aborym have packed their latest album with enough textures and styles to put Ween to shame, but at times the experiences feel so schizophrenic and scattered that the whole production feels almost avant-garde. The Italian group isn’t quite as “genre-by-the-pound” in execution as a band like Mr. Bungle, but sometimes it feels like the arrangements, time signatures and lyrics all fly by too quickly to absorb. In spite of all this, the group’s mission to combine the seething unease of Throbbing Gristle and the rawness of Norwegian black metal will always be an excellent guiding principle.