Dulce Liquido
Mind Domination
Out of Line
When Racso Agroyam of Hocico founded his Dulce Liquido side-project during the peak popularity of rhythmic noise in industrial clubs, the remit was simple and appealing; straightforward powernoise spiked with some of the rhythm programming and textures of Agroyam’s main project. Comeback record Mind Domination adheres to that template while the context around the sound of the record has changed, with a decade or so of industrialized techno and body music having primed the pump for its hard, unrelenting and largely instrumental material.
The main body of the 17 (!!) track album is made up of the kind of meat and potatoes rhythm and noise that defined the project’s earliest releases, austere and workmanlike. That’s not a bad thing by any means; so few acts are doing unreconstructed millennial power noise in this day and age that hearing a cut like “Dystopia”, 95% of which is made up of a massive kick drum, saturated cymbals and distorted bass programming is actually refreshing. Whether or not you could get away with dropping the unrelenting “The Art of Control” at your local club is questionable, what with with every other musical element pinned to the walls by the unrelenting pressure of its drums and strangled bass frequencies, but that doesn’t make it less fun to bang your head along to it.
That said, the record does suffer from excessive length, with many songs failing to differentiate themselves in any meaningful way. Tracks like “Signs of Decay” just don’t have that much going on outside of their application of the powernoise formula, its tossed off rave sirens in the final minute doing nothing to justify its length. To that point, the moments the album invokes classic techno are often its weakest; “Engage the Noise” is a crushed up version of hardcore that never captures that style’s manic appeal, while the pitched up “Yo DJ” sample on the gabber leaning “Post-Angst Anarchy” is more likely to annoy the listener than hype them up. They’re still preferable to the eye-rolling sex jam “Let’s Play”, which might have been a highlight if not for its terrible vocal hook.
There’s definitely a pretty enjoyable throwback rhythmic noise album inside of Mind Domination, a tight eight or nine track album that sticks to the projects strengths and really pushes its most industrial moments to the fore; the brutal and spartan “Wrath” and the screeching sheets of noise of “Ignorance Decadence & Putrefaction” would certainly make such a theoretical version of the record. In the age of streaming playlists that’s not an unreasonable way to maximize your enjoyment of the LP, as those seeking to take the whole thing in will likely find their patience being tested.
