How To Destroy Angels – Welcome Oblivion

Here’s one last album I grabbed in the death throes of our shite little HMV. This will mark the end of my Death Throes series. At least for now. Who knows if I’ll find any more before they’re gone!

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“How to Destroy Angels is a musical group featuring Atticus Ross, Rob Sheridan, Mariqueen Maandig and her husband Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails frontman). The group is named after a 1984 Coil song of the same name.” (Wiki)

This 2013 debut album is experimental, though the LA Times described it as “sensual electronic rock,” and I can’t argue with that either. It definitely has a muscular, sexy feel to it.

If you like Nine Inch Nails, there’s enough here to keep you happy. But this has another side, seperate from the angry pulsations of NIN. There’s an understated beauty to it where NIN can be quite jagged. Of course, I haven’t heard all of the later years NIN, so maybe there’s some of this in that work too, but this CD held my attention easily with it’s laidback tempos, an hesitation to be too forceful about anything. Different enough to be seperate, does that help?

The track Ice Age stands out as an oddity, those plucked strings (is it a banjo, maybe?), though there’s a humming whine in behind…

There was one single, How Long?, which is beautiful in its own way too.

In Sum:

I wouldn’t say there was one stand out track on this record, and I don’t know how often I would put it on as a focussed-listening album. But if this were on in the background as I did something else, I could see this album being pretty damn good accompaniment.