CRYO CRYOGENIC ALBUM PROGRESS PRODUCTIONS RELEASE: MAY 17, 2006 REVIEW: MAY 12, 2006

Imagine a cold, bleak world. The sky is grey, and dark metallic shapes roam the ground. The rage of war has left its mark everywhere, with houses in ruins and people in despair hiding in the remnants of their homes. This is the world of Cryo, at least to me. The music is sweeping, cold, dark and heavy. It conjures up all the images that this kind of music should.

“Cryogenic” is musically a sort of “best of EBM”, because there are all kinds of it present. Fast bass lines here, a slow and menacing song there, a more melodic track over there.

The influence of Front 242 can be heard clearly, but cast in a modern form. Martin Rudefelt, the Swede behind Cryo obviously knows how to treat his synthesizers well; it shows both in the sneaky “In the Shadows” and the raging “Vengeance” – the best tracks on here. These two are superb, but the album also contains gems such as the hypnotic and metallic “Machine”, the moody “Does it Hurt” and the vocoder explosion that is “Want it”.

This is some good shit, ladies and gentlemen. And it’s a debut album, no less! It’s going to be interesting to follow Martin’s future output, with a mature recording like this already under his belt.

My only gripe is that he’s turned the treble knob a bit too far up, but that’s a minor thing. "Cryogenic" still has my seal of approval.

JOHAN CARLSSON

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