��Without a doubt my favorite of all of the recent 2013 releases I've picked up from progressive black metal label Code666, Control Human Delete's The Prime Mover is the Dutch band's second album of angular bionic black metal, and it features a heavy 70's electronic music influence that I'm not used to hearing on albums like this, a strange mix of styles that often makes Prime Mover sound as if you're hearing some weird collaboration between Mysticum or Dodheimsgard and French synthesizer pioneer Jean Michel Jarre.

�� The band goes for an apocalyptic vibe right from the start, as crushing electronic noise pours across the opening moments of "New Replicators", clearing the way for the band's aggressive drum n' bass influenced rhythmic chaos and industrialized black metal. As the song gradually locks in to its sinister, fucked-up anti-groove, it becomes clear that Control Human Delete are pursuing a much more difficult and abstract strain of mechanized blackness with this album. Songs spasm and contort in short, spastic blasts, the discordant spiky riffs lurching over the off-time drum patterns and robotic blastbeats. Their weird, electronic-enhanced black metal definitely finds itself aligned with the spirit of Dodheimsgard's classic 666 International album, blending the Dionysian frenzy of electronic dance music with biting black metal riffs and complex, layered blast-rhythms, and adding other instruments like piano, and pipe organ with hellish distorted choral voices and moments of strange jazziness, pounding Wax Trax dance meltdowns, and clanking industrial for maximum delirium. This manic, scattershot approach to their music makes Control Human Delete's industrial black metal highly unpredictable, the album shifting schizophrenically across the complicated arrangements and sudden, jarring drops into blackened kosmische ambience. One of my favorite aspects of the album is the savage synthesizer tone, which really stands out from all of the other recent industrial black metal albums I've been listening to. The band uses extreme low-end synth chords and heavy distortion to create an added layer of black buzz that clings to their music, while also emitting lots of those previously mentioned vintage synth sounds, giving chunks of their music a demented 80's synthwave feel. There are some killer Tangerine Dream-like synth arpeggios that make parts of Prime Mover resemble an 80's action film soundtrack; hell, the beginning of "Shapeshifting" could have come off of a soundtrack to one of Nicolas Winding Refn's films. But on songs like "Transporter", the band evokes the rigid, ferocious feel of early 90s Ministry, fusing it to frostbitten Nordic black metal guitars, while intricate junglist drum tracks suddenly skitter through the mix, sending swarms of strange glitchery and chirping electronic melodies and spacey, psychedelic effects into flight. The heavy digital sheen on this stuff just adds to the malevolent, techno-horror atmosphere that the band invokes, a sound that seems summoned more from circuit boards and CPUs than from the stench of the grave. A solid album of crushing robotic black metal that's recommended to any of you guys who cant get enough of stuff like Mayhem's Grand Declaration of War, Abigor, Mysticum, Aborym, and the aforementioned Dodheimsgard.

�� Comes in a six panel digipack with booklet.