Industrial Dance as a genre has suffered a small set-back after the release of labelmates and genre flag-flyers Apoptygma Berzerk and VNV Nation latest albums.

Not that VNV Nation’s album (“Matter and Form”) is bad -on the contrary, its quite good. But even so it cannot compare to the bands previous masterpieces like “Empires”, “Praise the Fallen” or “Futureperfect”. There are may fine moments in the album but there also a few songs more conventional than someone would expect from this band.

But the actual problem is with Apoptygma Berzerk’s “You and me Against the World”. Stephen Groth (aka Grothesk) has clearly moved towards a more generic and mainstream direction. The band now sounds like an indie-rock band!

Even Apoptygma’s previous album -“Harmonizer”, despite targeting more radio air-time than necessary, was a good album. It had feeling and atmosphere (”Unicorn”), desperation and anger (”Suffer in Silence”, “Until the end of the World”) and it was mostly industrial sounds!

But, what used to characterize Apoptygma’s sound is now totally missing! No experimentation at all, no atmospheric synths/keyboards, not even good artwork -just compare current cover with previous ones… Apoptygma now sound like a bad mixture of Coldplay and HIM (not that a good mixture could ever come out of these two bands, but anyway…)

I will still give it more chances -because its Apoptygma! but this is the impression I got after five-six times listening to it…