Recently reissued by Tesco Org. in a new re-mastered edition that comes packaged in an attractive black digipack with spot-varnish printing, Leichenlinie is the first album from the notorious German death industrial group Genocide Organ, first released way back in 1989 in a handmade edition that was initially limited to a pressing of two hundred and ninety-one copies. It's a little strange to think that this album is over twenty years old, but the choking, abject horror of Leichenlinie sure hasn't dissipated a bit in the last two decades, and if you are a fan of death industrial and the blackest recesses of power electronics, this is mandatory listening; much of what you now hear in the extreme industrial music scene was in no small part informed by the throbbing black violence of Genocide Organ's seminal early work. As with their later releases, the trio used stark, unflinching scenes of warfare, genocide, and wholesale human degradation as the raw material for their black art, with zero fucking concern for the sensitivities of their potential listener (this disregard for niceties has caused them to become one of the more "controversial' groups within the European noise/industrial underground, which of course just makes 'em all the more appealing to me...). The music on Leichenlinie is pitch-black, corrosive, structurally simple with each track built out of heavy bass loops and harsh repetitive synthesizer figures; the rhythms tend to come from the hypnotic bashing of pipes on metal, bursts of syncopated static, skull-rattling over modulated bass, heavy clanking, all creating this heavy trance-like feel while the band surrounds these basic pounding rhythms and loops with vicious distorted screams, massive distorted electrical pulses, ominous drones wavering in the darkness, the sampled voices of human beings in the throes of mortal suffering. The pulsating early industrial works of Maurizio Bianchi definitely seems to be an influence on their sound, but the Organ drags that sound into heretofore unexplored depths of misery and horror. On tracks like "Stalins Orgeln", Genocide Organ recreates the stomp of amassed armies marching across scorched earth while the screeching metal of flesh-rending machinery fills the air; later, on "1...2...Tot", the heaving carcinogenic electronics, gusts of toxic gas and distant screams form a chilling death camp ambience. Indeed, any one moment off of this album could double as a horror film score if the actual subject matter of Leichenlinie wasn't so unrelentingly grim, and few industrial groups from this era mined the black vein of nightmarish suffering and mass death as effectively as Genocide Organ. Tesco added two very rare bonus tracks to this Cd reissue, "Amazade y Negri" and "This is no lie", which had previously appeared on the extremely limited Monochrome Meditator cassette released on the Japanese label SSSM in 1991; both are ghoulish, oppressive blots of black throb that actually work quite well as a finale to the album proper. Recommended.