M.A.C. OF MAD's career isn't the easiest to follow: emerging during the 90s as a mutation of the industrial music project Střední Evropa, M.A.C. OF MAD hasn't released many albums, concentrating mainly on live performances... Keep Music Evil is their first album since 2006. The line-up has changed since the early days, and the band have experimented with grindcore and death metal (a few traces of which can be found in Signal's growls, by the way), but their intentions are familiar: a furious, corrosive mix of digital hardcore and industrial metal, with chopping riffs and big, thumping beats. The return of the Czechs is good news for us, not so much for our neighbours, and is accompanied by another piece of good news: the apparent return to business of the Audiotrauma label, which we've missed!
This abrasive, chaotic and radical sound aesthetic is evident in Autodafe. Jana Von Habczak screams with acrimony, the guitar weighs down the atmosphere with dark grey clouds, tasting of rust and unhealthy metals. M.A.C. OF MAD oozes madness and revolt, and scratches just where we're itching for a boiling cyberpunk universe, sticky basements and raucous sounds with hardcore punk and electronic influences. We're obviously thinking of Atari Teenage Riot, but also AMBASSADOR21, Chrysalide and Youth Code. There's a taste for noise, fury, dissonance and merciless assault, but also the punk turbulence and raw emotions that give the music its depth and soul.
With its merciless rhythms, sometimes flirting with tribal, Keep Music Evil is a permanent explosion, a visceral spurt of madness whose intensity never falters and whose every track makes you want to shout its slogans. M.A.C. OF MAD alternates between flaming bombs (Young & Beautiful) and frenzied hallucinatory anxiety attacks (Needle in the Head). If the whispers of Nothing to Hide send shivers down our spines, it's not just because of the insanity they exude, but because you can feel that they're just the breathing space before the violence to come. The way the rhythm races and the textures collide and overlap is reminiscent of the montage in Shin'ya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo, a feverish experiment that oozes metal and cables.
Keep Music Evil: M.A.C. OF MAD keeps its word. While Neurodiesel, in a version refined from the one the band had already been playing for several years, takes us on board one last time in this crazy tornado of constant energy, the album leaves nothing but ruins. It gives off a delicious whiff of danger and unpredictability, something wild that spurts out and burns. The explosion didn't last half an hour, but the power of this supercharged cyberpunk storm was as massive as it was cathartic.
