Revolt is a relay race. Because while [a]Alec Empire[/a] shows no signs of flagging – he’s present here on mixing duties – the egalitarian ethos of Digital Hardcore demands all are given a crack against the forces of evil. Here, Elias, member of[a]Atari Teenage Riot[/a], takes up the baton.
Or picks it up, puts it down, and comes back later. Recorded piecemeal over four years, this is inevitably a disjointed scattershot of sounds wherein toys are tortured and evil layers of static (‘One Two’) are laid down. But while that’s nothing less than you’d expect, it also occasionally makes this album something a DHR record should never be: predictable.
Yet when it hits home – the impromptu drum’n’bass sound system in a riot that’s ‘Show’, or the whispered ‘Sirens’ scaring trip-hop into premature aneurys – it’s an awesome display of rage, unrelenting intelligence and convincingly menacing promises to readdress some gender iniquities. None more so than ‘You Will Never Get Me’, which sees Elias singing like a drunk Billie Holiday, and collides classical into jungle. More importantly it sounds truly ground-breaking.
In true DHR tradition, ‘In Flames’ is not punk, not dance, and sometimes barely even music. But then no-one ever said insurrection was going to run smoothly.