EVERY GENRE PROJECT - February 5 - Martial Industrial
Genre of the Day - Martial Industrial
Album of the Day - Masse Mensch Material by ROME (2008)
Do you ever learn about a new genre of music and somehow know exactly who the audience is? And it’s just not a normal sect of people? That’s how I felt today. You see, years ago in the depths of COVID, I was often exposed to maps accounts on Instagram as a geography lover, sharing fairly innocuous cartographic content about historical events and such. However, these accounts often attracted the most rancid, Euro-nationalist, wojak-using teenagers in the comments, and out of sheer boredom, I often got into fights with them. Anyway, that’s who today’s genre is for—slightly deranged history nerds who for some reason yearn for the good old days of abject violence and bloody warfare that once constituted Europe before the pesky EU’s bureaucracy, what with its trampling on national identity or whatever.
Maybe that’s a harsh diagnosis. Maybe an article’s hook should avoid denigrating an entire genre’s fanbase when I’m going off solely intuition. They (me) will do anything for clout, I guess. I’m sure my five readers will get in quite the tizzy. In terms of what the genre sounds like musically, it blends industrial and folk elements with the ominous rawness of militaristic ambience and sometimes marching beats. Martial industrial is highly influenced by a peculiar but influential brand of European thought in the past thirty years. While individual groups may vary in their views within the genre across the spectrum, there’s a general rejection of the tameness and what they see as complacent centrism and bureaucracy of Europe today and a yearning for the dark, militaristic Europe of yore. Some of this is from a leftist bias, such as the controversial Laibach: whether co-opting symbolism and the philosophy that the once-great west has declined is artistic or some powerful statement or whatever is a matter of personal opinion, though. But at the end of the day, genres like these pose the question of whether you can truly separate the art from the movement.
As always, though, I don’t have time to look at more than one album at a time, which brings us to the #1 album of martial industrial, Luxembourgish (!) act ROME’s Masse Mensch Material. For the most part throughout this column, I do find that the albums I listen to deliver at least somewhat on the promises of the genre, although given that being #1 within any field takes some distinguishing yourself from the crowd and perhaps deviating from genre conventions. Although it’s my only exposure to martial industrial thusfar, I can’t say Masse Mensch Material did, although it’s a relatively diverse album.
The album opens with the haunting ambient track “Sonnengötter,” laying out a foundation for the album’s dark tone and it genuinely had me intrigued. However, the next track failed to match that opener for me, with its terrible first line and generally feeling like folky-tinged rock although I enjoyed the inclusion of the militaristic drums and doleful guitar solo in the latter half. This album is a mixed bag for me: where the lyricism excels, the music falls flat and resorts to contemporary, chambery folk, and when the lyrics fail (History smells of whore / it’s oozing out through our pores) the more authentically dark and ambient tracks give it a boost. “Kriegsgotter” is a track that was more dramatic and in line with my expectations and what makes this genre stand out as a unique strand of music. Ultimately, though, the lyrical sense of self-inscribed drama doesn’t always have quite the resounding effect on me as it did on many RYM listeners. And frankly, I don’t yearn for the days of trench warfare or long to die in a cold European village in 1600s of complications from unpasteurized milk exposure, so perhaps I was never the audience to begin with.