I used to listen to a lot more industrial music than I do now. The town that I grew up in had a bar that would host a "goth night" on Sundays, and it was something of a mecca for more for about 8 months. Now, getting blitzed on Pabst while listening to the same dozen or so VNV Nation and Aesthetic Perfection tracks every weekend was hardly a glorious existence, but the memories of that time are still a mental refuge for me in times of stress or uneasiness. After I moved away, I casually kept up with industrial music until I decided that I was old enough to develop the habit of listening to serious and mature music that would ease my passage into adulthood- stuff like the Decemberists and anything else the writers over at Pitchfork were recommending 10 years ago... and now, a decade and a lifetime later, here I am listening to and loving Rabbit Junk's Apocalypse for Beginners. For all the effort I made to develop "respectable" tastes in music, I'm now an old ass man, back to gyrating and banging my head to dark, sweaty industrial metal again- except now that most of my blitzing hours are confined to my living room and/or home office. Makes you wonder why I ever strayed... Now Rabbit Junk isn't a strictly industrial metal outfit, nor a traditional metal band- the project, masterminded by the singular (singularity?) JP Anderson, is an ever more complex and evolving, technical and emotional roller coaster, one that he tunes up and torques to an even higher level of devilish perfection with each release. It is an endeavor that defies categorization beyond the gestalt of his insoluble will. The truth, though, is that even though the project is clearly something that JP is driven to do for himself, and seemingly only himself, it's hard not to feel like he's giving his all to bring the audience into his world and up to his eye level. Every track on Apocalypse for Beginners is incredibly anthemic and impeccably produced, with massive sweeping, righteously endowed choruses, buffered and buoyed by fearsome electronic percussion, whose rhythms are lashed to the cadence of a hot beating heart as a war horse is yoked to a charging chariot. Industrial disco devil dives crash and cascade around the adrenaline-spiked vocal delivery on opener "Heavy," while "Love is Hell" with its soaring vocal delivery, confessional overtones, and steel-marbled guitar work captures a combustible theatricality that causes the song to resemble in its tortured spirit, a kind of nu-metal overhaul of the Phantom of the Opera, surf riffs splashe off thrasher grooves on high-flying firestorm "Bodies," while the bouncy rush and rip ong "Rabbit Out of Hiding" resembles a surprisingly elegant, Brundlefly-esque amalgamation of Blondie and Sisters of Mercy. If you're in the mood to kick-start the end of days, you'd be hard-pressed for a better instruction manual or soundtrack.
