Convenience – Die Warzau

Nearly a decade (which is about half a dozen lifespans in the electronic music scene) after their last album, 1995's Engine, Die Warzau return with the unsettled and finally rather disappointing Convenience. Much less confrontational than the duo's earlier music, Convenience sounds in large part like a tentative attempt to introduce Die Warzau's sample-happy dance-industrial aesthetic into a world where industrial is entirely yesterday's news, but it's not yet quite so old that it's got kitschy nostalgia value quite yet. That's precisely the netherworld that this album inhabits as well, unfortunately. While there are some enjoyable moments -- particularly "King of Rock and Roll" (the track that makes plain the largely unexplored connection between glitch and heavy industrial) and the downtempo opener "Crusaders," which answers the question "What would happen if Skinny Puppy remixed an Air single?" -- too much of the album is devoted to mush like "Kleen," a misguided attempt at a straight synth-pop ballad of a type not seen since Ministry's awful debut With Sympathy. Jim Marcus and Van Christie haven't lost any of their production chops, as the sound is richly three-dimensional and sparkling in a way that few of the other industrial acts could ever manage, but especially after such a long furlough, it's a shame that they didn't have better material to work with. ~ Stewart Mason, All Music Guide