The Neon Judgement - General Pain & Major Disease

Believe it or not, Front242 is not the only pioneeringly influencial Belgian practitioner of Electronic Body Music (aka Industrial Dance). The Neon Judgement shares that exact same distinction. But, where Front242 took inspiration from Karlheinz Stockhausen, Fad Gadget, and Joy Division, The Neon Judgement's biggest influences were apparently The Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd. I don't know if that's audibly true, i haven't heard any of their music yet, but luckily enough i have their 3rd compilation album General Pain and Major Disease. That's an Industrial album title par excellence, so i expect it will at least be highly enjoyable, whatever it turns out to be. 

But this is a Bottle review, so it's barely tangentially about the album and instead more about the overarching context i blindly walked into by buying random albums from semi-anonymous randos on the internet, like i do. I somehow wandered into the weirdness that is European New Wave. I say European because if you didn't already know, New Wave practically requires an entire series of books to disambiguate, and fair warning, in the process you'll find out that Punk is New Wave, New Wave is Post Punk, and therefore most confusingly Punk is also Post Punk because Punk wasn't Punk until after Punk. 

But back to the matter at hand. European New Wave encompasses, at least according to this small collection, Electro-Industrial, French Indie, and early English EDM (which is not to be confused with actual English New Wave which is both pre Post Punk Punk and Echo & The Bunnymen style post pre Post Punk Post Punk but not exactly Joy Division style post Punk Post Punk or A Flock Of Seagulls style New Wave, and definitely not American New Wave which is The Cars and Blondie and Talking Heads). Now that we've got that straightened out (i say in my Rodney Dangerfield face), let's just let our ears see what The Neon Judgement is all about. 

Holy moly this is good stuff. You could have a totally different perpective, but i begin from KMFDM and Thrill Kill Kult, and Front242 and The Neon Judgement sound unmistakably like their primary influences. Actual music wise, The Neon Judgement is all over the place because sampling is fun, but it's all still identifiably Industrial Dance ala Addams Family kookiness. I'm loving it, but if Depeche Mode and The Cure are your thing you could easily confuse this for really obscure Darkwave even though it isn't. 

Here's the thing, whatever you want to call any of this stuff, it's a very straightforward recipe: 1) danceable beat, 2) prominent looped bass lines, 3) weird samples of whatever you want intermixed with synths, 4) deadpan, non emotive and minimally melodic vocals. Cover those bases in that order and you've got yourself some kind of Industrial Somethingorother. 

Will people look at you weird if this is bleeding out from your heardphones? Absolutely, but all things considered i'd call The Neon Judgement completely approachable. Sure, it's scary, but in the same way an amusement park haunted house is scary when you know at the end of the day none of these people are actually going to follow you to your car and spontaneously murder you. Front242, for all their contextually mainstream appeal, sounds completely menacing by comparison, at least in my opinion. Ok, not nearly malnourished canine levels of menacing, but this is Belgium not Canada, even though early Skinny Puppy definitely qualifies as EBM to my ears. The Neon Judgement sound like they mostly have a healthy variety to their diet and get to take plenty of naps on the couch. 

Like i said, good stuff.