This album from Terminus marks an improvement over their "Victim Culture" EP that I reviewed last year. Terminus does stay strong to their industrial stylings. This isn't just that "industrial" label used commonly today; they stick with the old styles of having hard pounding, industrial (like a manufacturing plant) sounds, and provide a mood of hatred and intensity. This three member outfit is going for a very complex sound; listen to the beginning of "A Scanner Darkly" and you'll hear quite a few tracks of sound (mainly samples), all combined effectively, and still maintained room for a variety of heavy guitar riffing. I continue to listen to this arrangement and am getting quite involved in it, then the vocals kick in. Peter Johnson has some very aggressive vocals, and they fit the music perfectly; the rhythm matches the syllables of speech quite precisely and the pitch and courseness blends with the industrial sound. The problem is that the glory of the music sort of fades out during the vocal sections. Becoming much simpler and fewer, the tracks of music are made of short segments repeated over and over. The vocal sections are then the only major component of the album that make it a little less desirable than it could be. This also allows the title track "Toxic Iron Splinter" to shine through. It's a wonderful atmospheric industrial track. Terminus' style is also very technical, the timings of all the riffs and samples are precise and the transitions approach, and reach, perfection at times. You may guess then, as with many other technical styles, that emotion is curbed to accomodate this, and you would be partially correct. The music is often stuck between a get-up-and-bang-your-head-against-other-people and a sit-back-chill-and-listen-to-the-mastery-of-our-music styles. Terminus would have been better off curbing the emotion even more, mainly by changing the vocals (as done on "True Sight"), to get a stronger technical album. They could then record a live show and get their more emotional side to shine through. This way they could have had two great albums instead of one good album.
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