I have to give it up to Chemlab for the brief chunk of movie dialog that opens East Side Militia. After several gunshots that sound about as loud on CD as 44.1 kHz digital sampling allows, some tough guy yells, "Goddamnit! Son of a bitch, I'll kill you right there! Move when I say move, motherfucker!" And then the guitars come in. This kind of thing has been done a million times by now, it's true, but I've never heard anything quite as mean-sounding as this. It's good for a loud thrill on the first listen, which, unfortunately, is more than I can say for East Side Militia as a whole.

Chemlab lyricist Jared Louche wants us to admire his ability to chronicle the seedy underbelly of human nature. Louche's fictional world is a place where crackheads fuck in tubs of gasoline, strung-out chicks jam needles into their asses through tight leather pants, and friends have nicknames like "Detox." It's supposed to be a decadent portrait of human nature gone wrong and Darwinian selection in reverse, but when it comes to selling this murky fantasy, Louche don't know P.K. Dick. And the sample-heavy industro-metal, while offering some impressively abrasive guitar riffs occasionally, doesn't stand up to what Ministry was doing eight years earlier.

Some song titles for you: "Jesus Christ Pornostar," "Pyromance," "Exile on Mainline." All this could be good for a chuckle if Chemlab didn't take themselves so seriously. Jared Louche's liner notes to this reissue (East Side Militia first appeared in 1996) make it plain that he truly sees himself and his spent industrial cronies as dangerous auteurs working the edge: "'Vera Blue' is a composite of three nocturnal women I knew in NYC; a street walker, a drug dealer and a gun runner." Come to think of it, East Side Militia is good for a chuckle. A belly laugh, even. Listening to Chemlab is about as enlightening as smoking weed with a teenage stoner who just read "Junky" and "No One Here Gets Out Alive." In this case, the road to excess leads to the cutout bin.

-Mark Richard-San