Amoeba - Pivot © Release Records Unlike Watchful, this album sounds sorta like a rock album rather than ambient, although the softest rock I have ever heard in my life. I don't care for this softish rock stuff as much because it sounds similar to other music I've heard, but it's still quite good. Songs like No Empty Promises and Moonlight Flowers remind me of old-school, Space Oddity era David Bowie. There's still a hint of the mystical and almost spooky sounding ambience here and there, definitely more prevalent in some songs than others, amidst acoustic guitar, electric guitar, cello, piano, strange organ sounding music, and no doubt a handful of other instruments I can't identify. I will consider this a personal classic, but I still like Watchful better!

		Numb - Blood Meridian © Metropolis Records After discovering their killer song on Electropolis Volume I, I decided to investigate further into the world of Numb! First of all, this album starts off with the most god-awful, blood curdling, mechanical buzz-crunching sound I have ever heard in my life. Listen up industrial artists: that's not funny. Please stop putting deafening chaos like that at the beginning of your songs. I know your image, you don't have to blow up a small piece of my brain to show it to me. What's worse is when I hear it over and over and recognize it as part of a song so it sounds like music to me. Truly horrible. Notwithstanding the first thirty seconds, this album is pretty good. It didn't live up to my expectations based on the song that appeared on Electropolis, but those songs were hand-picked classics, so I was naive. The only thing that really disappointed me on this album were the vocals. They sound good some of the time, but they don't have enough effects and whatnot on them. The singer sounds like a human and not a god trapped in a machine making copper wires bleed. Call me crazy, but that means it's lacking! Still a good CD, but Numb is capable of much cooler.

		Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan - Revelation © Interra Records Okay, I don't know a whole lot about middle-eastern music, only that it is sometimes just as scary and strange sounding as German music... and strange music I do like. I'm not sure what the customs or traditions are for this type of music, but 15-minute songs does seem a bit overkill for this particular style. That's what this album is, four 15-minute songs. And each song pretty much sounds exactly the same for all 15 minutes. I'm thinking there's probably value in these lyrics that I don't understand, so maybe I'm missing the whole picture. The four different songs don't seem to me all that different from one another either. Just to be sure, I have listened to this album at least six times (while playing Counter-Strike; you should play on the terrorist side while listening to this shit, you will achieve a whole new level of one-ness with the AK-47). Overall, I like this music, it's just not varied enough for my tastes.

		Electropolis Volume I © Metropolis Records This is a compilation album showcasing a handful of the artists signed with Metropolis Records. I loved Metropolis Records before I downloaded this; now I wish to have a child with them (and name him or her Niffum Fluffjunction). Whoever chose the songs for this release certainly knew what they were doing, as every song has the makings of a hit (they are catchy as holy hell, and that's not so common for a lot of industrial music). Some of my favorite artists have songs on this album, including Wumpscut, Front Line Assembly, Funker Vogt and Haujobb. And because of this album, I have found a new handful of artists I absolutely love, along with the rest, which I also think are quite good. The songs by Numb and Out Out are stunning in the way gets inside your head and makes you attempt to amputate your own leg with a jackhammer. The Evil's Toy song sounds like light-hearted NES music under the influence of methamphetamines and stainless steal nails. Mentallo & The Fixer and Snog have a couple great, mostly-instrumental (with a tad of corpse-like vocals) songs, and the song by In Strict Confidence just won't get out of my head (maybe I faulted in choosing a flat-head screwdriver). As brilliant as that all sounds (for an industrial fan anyway), the real star of the show here is Wumpscut's Soylent Green with German lyrics. I loved the English version I had heard before, but didn't even know a German version existed until now, and jesus does it sound fucked up.

		Amoeba - Watchful © Release Records Amoeba is a side project of a man named Robert Rich, who has apparently produced a ton of ambient albums (under his real name). In contrast to Robert Rich's electronic sounds of barren and isolated landscapes, Amoeba is more instrumental and has vocals. The weird thing is that it's all mixed together so well, and the instruments and vocals are so unobtrusive, that it still sounds like ambient music, but very unique and beautiful at that (yeah, I just used the word beautiful, excuse me while I remove my testicles). With these new elements added to the basic ambient formula, each song seems to stand on its own. You will actually start to recognize individual songs after you give this album a few listens, which is somewhat rare for the ambient genre. This music sounds like the forest, the ocean, and the mountains singing. Very peaceful. When I listen to it, I aspire to be a monk... albeit a monk without testicles, 20,000 feet above sea level, cursing the gods atop Mt. McKinley, wearing nine layers of coats, three layers of black jeans, and a Rammstein tshirt.

		Lee Scratch Perry Experryments at the Grass Roots of Dub © Ariwa This is considered "dub" music. I have never known what that means, but apparently it's a weird, funky style of reggae. Weird, funky reggae... that's sorta what this is, although it sounds like trip hop and borderline techno at times, with weirdass vocal effects and god knows what is causing all those hard-hitting percussion sounds. There's a lot of trumpet and a lot of bongos that form the background for a variety of synthesizer sounds. All in all, I believe one could attain this very sound by tossing a Rastafarian into some sorta beatnik jazz club full of weed and cotton candy. And a drum machine that creates such ferocious and/or sharp beats that someone loses their toes over the whole process. I can definitely see myself listening to this a lot in the future; the songs stick like that junk that comes shooting out from within a Hot Pocket and coats the roof of my mouth so I can't get it off and makes me feel like I swallowed a star 2.5x as large as our sun.

		Front Line Assembly - Implode © Metropolis Records To be fair, I started listening to this album long before I subscribed to EMusic (about two years). At first, I thought there were only a few songs really worth listening to. Well, I now think of those few songs as the "hits" of the album, the ones I would consider "great". However, after a few listens, I found that the other songs are quite good too, although maybe a little less memorable and a little less catchy... and typically I love the songs that sound like they have ogres yelling in them, so the majority of the songs must have been missing that for the most part. If I were a member of the spaceship crew in the movie Alien (or hell, even Aliens), this is the music I would be listening to whilst sitting on my black on black pseudo-pilot-chair-thing, at my pre-80s computer mainframe with meaningless yellow and/or green numbers and redundant statements flying across my screen. This album is one-third "KILL THOSE ALIENS!" one-third "I've come into touch with my spirituality in this dark corner of space" and one-third something in between. There's songs like Prophecy that make me want to shoot projectiles at the sun, songs like Synthetic Forms that make me feel like I should surround myself in a semi-circle of blue LEDs and worship circuit boards and aluminum and then songs that don't really know what they are like Torched (sounds almost like drum 'n' bass).