Combichrist: What the Fuck is Wrong With You People?

wordplay: Billy Schear
image: Sean Hartgrove

Like a knife caked in rust, the tactical bloody beats on What the Fuck is Wrong With You People? are a filthy, yet dangerously sharp amalgamation.

Techno is a tricky genre to carve one’s niche in. The category is saturated with everyone from members of high profile, defunct industrial bands, to 14 year-old ravers with nothing more than a laptop and an afternoon to kill. Beyond market saturation is the overwhelming obstacle of distinguishing one’s style from that of other electronic dreamers, not a mission for the unmotivated.

Musically, Combichrist does little to set themselves apart from their contemporaries. Founder Andy LaPlegua (and sole performer on the album) sets up his beats in a uniformly raw manner. The trick though, is how LaPlegua masterfully perverts what could easily be mistaken for pure and sexy dance music.

The distorted howls, snarls, belts and groans takes you immediately out of the glitzy disco and places you directly in the simmering, hot work shed of a deranged maniac, where the eardrums blister and the nerves are peeled. Sampling realizes its full potential in the fifth track when after every assertion Laplegua makes, Dennis Hopper chimes right in with an abrupt: “Fuck That Shit!” out of every line from Blue Velvet that could have been used as a song title I’m glad it was that one. 

Combichrist is the perfect outfit when you want sexy to be filthy, invoking guiltless almost violent pleasure, they take techno away from the soft of heart and deliver it to an audience of rabid gore-mongers hard to miss as the album’s title track trumpets an indignant anthem, the chorus of which doesn’t ask it demands to know just what the fuck is wrong with you people?

August 28th @ The Oriental

Combichrist.com