The debut album from the Italian industrial-metal-soundscape duo Deflorecame out a while back on cd on a European label, but was more recently reissued on vinyl by the US label KNVBI in a deluxe gatefold double Lp package that we just got in stock here at C-Blast, which is where I first found out about this band. The band cranks out a sound that is somewhat comparable to later-era Godflesh, with lots of crushing metallic riffage and booming low-end throb, but with an approach to sound design that's a lot more complex and detail oriented than your typical industro-metal outfit, with a textural quality that makes much of this album sound like an electronic film score. Along with the expected instrumentation, Deflore also incorporates everything from samplers and shortwave radios to amplified sheet metal and cellos into their sound. And then there are the beats; all throughout Human Indu[B]strial, massive quasi-breakbeats and percussive metallic grooves rise up out of the dark fields of futuristic ambience. It's almost entirely instrumental, and when voices do appear, they show up as background noise, hushed whispers drifting menacingly out of the shadows, or a brief bit of sampled dialogue, or a looped, processed vocal mantra. Like the vocals, the guitars and electronic elements are also treated to heavy amounts of post-production fuckery that renders squalls of guitar noise into industrial abrasion and crafts lush layered electronica that moves beneath and between Deflore's massive mecha-metal grooves. It's not all non-stop pummel, though; the heaviness often breaks away into passages of murmuring nocturnal ambience or distant factory rumblings, turning back into a sort of murky abstracted electronica for a while before suddenly dropping back into the crushing industrial doom.

The du[B] part of the album title is there for a reason, too. The deeper you get into the album, the more that Deflore brings out the huge crunching breakbeats and dubbed-out basslines, sometimes going into heavy tribal drumming or machine-like rhythmic pound, but also going into these killer stretches of almost Scorn-esque industrial dub, massive bass and thumping claustrophobic beats and bone-shaking bass drops vibrating within a midnight wasteland of electronic detritus and skin-crawling samples, in the end reminding me of what it would sound like if someone merged the mechanical grind of Godflesh or Pitchshifter with Charlie Clouser's unsettling industrial soundtracks.

This double Lp edition is limited to three hundred copies on colored vinyl, and includes two bonus tracks that did not appear on the original CD version.