BRIGHTER DEATH NOW - 1890 - LP - Cold Meat Industry

This time Roger Karmanik finally reached the bottom, and this new BDN album tells us a lot about which direction the industrial scene is heading for in the future...
"1890" was announced as a strictly-limited vinyl only release, nothing amazing for the followers of the Swedish project, was it not for the fact that Cold Meat Industry warned that it would have been pressed just as many copies as requested by shops and mail-orders, and then no further pressings, so everybody was invited to reserve a copy as soon as possible!
But, let's talk about the music! Brighter Death Now produces, of course, noise, and on this LP all you will find is noise, boring, annoying, senseless noise. The record is divided into 4 tracks, no titles, no explanations about the concept of the work, nothing at all. The first track is a long mixture of voices which you could easily hear everyday on the street or on the market place.... who needs to listen to such stuff at home? The second and the fourth are just noise, without any rhythm and any interest. The only track one could listen to is the third, a repetitive electronic rhythm below which Karmanik's voice screams in the distance. Not enough, in my opinion, to save the entire LP.
"In the current strident flow of industrial music releases a few persons will most likely forever stand out as being more invigoratingly dedicated and for always having a fingermarked touch added to their outcome. Make no mistake, BDN are certainly among them. Given the right time, this new album soon will be regarded as one among the classics." If such statements were written by the "industrial journalist" on duty, no problem, sadly this is the advertisment on the CMI website!
Karmanik is quite arrogant and pretentious when he dares considering himself above his colleagues, especially since he has been releasing one crap LP after the other for 15 years.... At least all his previous works (even the massively criticized "Obsessis") did feature at least 3-4 interesting tracks, but this is absolutely not the case of "1890".
He will enter history for sure, but as the founder of CMI, certainly not as BDN, and if it's true, as he claims in interviews, that he does his "music" just for himself and not for the audience, then he should keep his records at home to delight hosts in the evening, instead of pulling our legs.
The advertisment also said: "it's already a collector item!".
When it finally came out, the edition was discovered to be of 800 copies, which still aren't sold out at all, neither at CMI itself, much less in the shops... isn't that called dirty business???
Honestly, I'm fed up with all this clowns and their limited edition vinyls. Am I supposed to buy good and challenging music to listen to, or extremly expensive black plastic discs which will be gathering dust on the shelf??
At this point I really prefer to collect beer corks.... cheaper and less pretentious!

Simone Valcauda
April 2002

Contact :
Cold Meat Industry
e-mail : info@coldmeat.se
web : http://www.coldmeat.se/