Artist: Mangadrive
Album: Artifice
Label: Cyberninja.Digital
Review by: Outsider (aka Adrian Onsen)

Industrial Techno at its finest.

There. That’s the short version of the review. Though I need to scratch the itch to express in a little more detail how I feel about this album.
I have heard tracks off prior albums from the Mangadrive collection (including the early free albums) but none had me convinced to write something about it up until this point. Don’t get me wrong, they were great and offered great value (especially the free album Dreamcore is dead).

There were many things that swept me off my feet with this release including the awesome album cover design. The wide range of BPMs, the evolving and progressive melodies, the coherence and consistency of the quality of material, to name a few, were refreshing. Through and through I can’t say there is a ‘bad’ track on this album. Sure I like some more then others, but for different reasons on each track but no track stands out as one I’d skip every time I listen to the album.
The intelligent base lines and unique melodies on this album are carefully sculpted and give the tracks depth and volume which complement the rhythm and beats perfectly.  The album overall is very well crafted with a lot of attention to detail and layered sounds.
Even though the album has obvious elements of both trance/tencho and industrial, the blending of the two genres is performed with such surgical scalpel precision as to make the result difficult to place in one tribe or the other. However that is not what you’ll be concerned with when listening to it. Your main concearn will likely be how not to attract attention from your neighboring cubicle buddies while shaking you various body parts at the office, in time with the beat.
And this is not a short album either, clocking in at around 70min of music with a couple of epically 8-9 minute long tracks this album gives you a lot of listening time for your money.

Give the album a listen (for free) and you’ll see what I mean. The Mangadrive bandcamp page gives the option to listen before you buy.