I was really stoked to hear this debut from Transitional when I found out that Dave Cochrane was involved...the former member of industrial hip-hop squad Ice (alongside Kevin Martin and Justin Broadrick), jazz-punkers God, legendary industrial heavies Head Of David, the terminally underrated Sweet Tooth and now current member of Jesu has long been one of my favorite musicians in the UK underground, and I always know that anything this guy is involved with is going to be an instant fave. He's joined by Kevin Laska, who I know from his role in Novatron, another immensely underrated outfit that also features Anthony Di Franco (Skullflower) and some of the heaviest black-hole industrial/dirge/metal ever on the album New Rising Sun that came out on Cold Spring back in 2000. So here we've got two longtime members of the UK underground teaming up, and maybe not too surprisingly, they create a sound that is comparable to the pounding industrial metal of Godflesh, a comparison that is aided by Justin Broadrick's mastering job on the album...several of the songs on this disc feature lumbering, ultraheavy programmed drums that grind away at huge slo-mo breakbeats and crushing dirges, massive crunchy guitars and percussive riffing that reminds me of the first few Godflesh albums, while putting their own little spin on the sound with vocoder vocals, layers of processed distortion and electronics, and droning synths that have an almost New Wave tone. It's actually a lot like the really early Nadja stuff, when Nadja where much more obviously inspired by Godflesh and before they turned into the melodic, blissed out dreamsludge they are now. But the other half of the album is quite different...tracks like "Abandonement" and "Fractured" are epic washes of distorted guitar ambience and fuzzy electronic textures, throbbing dronescapes spotted with weird electronic noises and damaged, overdriven guitar riffing, glitchy fragments of rhythm and subharmonic elextronic squelch, dark industrial drone music, abstract and expansive, and it reminds me of a combination of artists like Maeror Tri, Cranioclast, and Coil. The mix of ultraheavy machine dirge and menacing industrial drone comes together nicely, and makes Nothing Real a more experimental take on the slomo bliss/sludge sound shared by Jesu, Nadja, and The Angelic Process. Very cool. Comes packaged in a full color digipack.