What happens when kids grow up watching the Seventh Seal and listening to Fade To Black in lieu of the usual cartoon and bubble gum pop options? You get Ack!, an industrial concept band. Their album, complete with skeletal images on its jacket and song titles like “thanatos”, “a mournful dirge” and “devouring the lamb”, is a mixture of experimental electronic noise and hard industrial rock backed by sound bites from (presumably) horror movies. 

The bulk of Ack! sounds much like Nihil-era KMFDM. Every aspect of the sound is electronic, vox included, w/lots of fast guitar riffs and drum tracks. Song three, “control”, immediately conjures up images of Tweakie cuttin’ the rug in a Buck Rogers discotheque scene (my wife started doing the robot dance when she first heard it, no joke). The interludes between songs are a mixture of organs, strings and dark sound bites from movies – any of the interludes could be background music for trips across the river Styx or convoluted operating table dreams in horror movies.

Ack! is an all-or-nothing album. If you’re in the mood, it’s awesome and enervating in a way only sinister music about death and suffering can be, however if you’re not feeling it, you’re really not feeling it. I gave it a 3.5 only because it can be a 5 or a 1 offering depending on the listener’s mood, but overall I really dug the album. Except now I’m afraid of the dreams I’ll have from listening to it.
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This CD is misleading at first, you have to listen to the entire album to understand the power.  The first track starts with some noisy, abrasive sound with some hiphop style drums and an acoustic guitar. Then the next couple of songs are on the noisy, more metal side of industrial music.  But as the album progresses, it becomes less “industrial-ish” and turns to a more odd, ponderous death metal (although the synths and electronics are still there, they are more transparent).  The album ends fantastically – the song “Cuts” dissolves into noise, and we are left with some sort of odd lullaby drifting off peacefully, a perfect finish to the CD in my opinion.  The first half of the CD is very good, but the style of the songs change subtly during the second half of the CD. From “Contact” onward, I think these are the strongest songs.
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Even though I mentioned "heavy metal" in the description, I definitely want to emphasize the "experimental" part of this.  To really enjoy this CD, you must be looking for something totally different.  This isn't metal, industrial, noise, death, technical, or just experimental.  This is all of those combined into one CD, track, sound, and mentality.  The music twists from techno beats to black metal guitaring to melodic doom, to goth industrial electronica.  Very interesting.
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