Chemlab - Oxidizer
Chemlab has always been Jared Louche's 21st century alchemical experiment, biomechanically injecting chemical cocktails straight into the active parts of your brain and organs to see just which combination of sound and fury makes you turn. Not "I'm off to take a turn around the dance floor, love" turn, but a transformation into fully realized children of the mechanical and chemical age.
Chemlab's first iteration during the 1990s came in the wake of the Nine Inch Nails monolith when all beasts fueled by adrenochrome and the glistening promise of cyberpunk technology vanished into the black shadow of "industrial rock and roll." Louche stepped out from that shadow with Covergirl (billed as Jared Louche and the Aliens), a record of cover tunes spun through his personal filter. The sharpest choice he made was to turn the Chemlab standard "Suicide Jag" into a slinking lounge piece. Covergirl is a great little record that allowed Louche to say, "See? This is where I come from." And then, Pied Piper-like, he danced off into the dark wilderness of the London streets.
Oxidizer is his report from the dark belly of the city. It's a Chemlab record -- the buzzsaw guitars, the thundering choruses, the glittering darkness of ambient nightmares, the sly and dry delivery of the mechanized orator -- but it is also a record made by a man who cleaves to the idea of a glam-powered, chrome-covered, diode-splintered future that can be spiked directly into the erogenous centers of your brain so that he can play you his personal collection of Thelonious Monk and Erik Satie records. The Chemlab future is filled with hydraulic fluid, synaptic fields of self-aware wetware and faded rainbows of fiber optic cabling; the future is one of touch screens and touch pads instead of physical contact, of virtually realized existences and phantom emotions which have been chemically provided because we've sold the real flesh and blood to black market organ-leggers. "Catch a steel low-engine whine / Along the sweating curve of your spine."
However, somewhere in there-- Louche and the rest attest -- we are still human. Hidden behind the last suture track (the short interstitial bits of sound and poetry that have been a trademark bridging device throughout Chemlab's history) is "Jesuschristpornostar," a widely euphoric instrumental track that throws off the shackles of the bitter and bleak songs of Oxidizer to revel in the inherent pornographic glory of the human body. Oxidizer, really, is all about human contact, about finding some glimmer of humanity in an increasingly dehumanized, mechanized world. While the narrative voice gets lost in the despair of a binary hegemony -- "Quick low you might avoid detection / Total lobotomy is your best copy protection" -- there is still a spark of persistent individuality that cannot be shut off. The final refrain of "Atomic Automatic" isn't one of resignation or collapse, but an exhortation to "keep it out," to keep out the emptiness. "Force Quit" is a directive to break the cycle, to break free from the destructive pre-programming which has set your half-life to expire tomorrow. "And when the stars are all burned out / Don't try and tell me what it's all about."
"Do you want to be free or do you want to be right?"
Musically, while the majority of the record adheres to the essential principles of machine rock, scattered throughout are the same textured elements which made Louche's Cover Girl an enjoyable record. He slides easily from full-throated howl to bit-farmed growl to world weary aside, pulling the music in his wake. The suture bits on the ends of the record supply us with textured entry and egress points while the pair buried in the record are waiting to ambush us. [And, frankly, the rhythmic noise of track 4 should be given its own record in which to fully explode with Louche providing lyrics to accompany that dissolution of monochrome reality.]
"The moon looked down one night," Louche intones on the final track, "and laughed so hard that the scales fell from his eyes. And from then on the moon looked down and cried." The future is here, kids; it's going to change us all. How we embrace it is up to us. How we use it is our choice. How we let it abuse us is our singular option. Fight, flight, or be free. Just don't sit still and let it absorb you into its pixelated homogeneity. Oxidize. Change. Turn.
Chemlab
Invisible Records [2004]
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