Album Review — Babe’s Faves: Chemlab’s East Side Militia (1996)

I moved out to Los Angeles three days after my first Chemlab concert. It was a crazy thing to do — I flew from my parents’ house to Chicago to see Chemlab for their absolutely insane return from the dead concert at Cold Waves, then, without returning home, met my parents’ at the LAX airport, stayed the night at one of the dingiest motels I had ever seen (the room was directly beside the hot tub, smelled like chlorine and mildew, and the floors and walls were soggy!), and then from there drove to my new dormitory to begin my exciting university life in the city. It was a crazy change; I had spent my formative years as a very young child in LA, but my parents had eventually dragged me off to a little farm town in the middle of nowhere, and that was where I had been trapped through all of middle school, high school, and community college. Now, I was excited to begin a new life, returning to the city, just as Chemlab had returned to the stage. And, of course, the whirlwind of excitement that the move brought me was backed by the lingering adrenalin and ecstasy brought by the concert that had ushered in this pivotal moment in my life.

For the first half year that I was in LA, I was entirely alone. I had not actually known anyone there when I moved. I met up with people on occasion, cool online friends who came in to visit or people I got to hang out with when I attended local goth clubs and parties, but I didn’t actually know anyone locally, and I was hours away from my family and friends. Although I don’t consider myself a misanthropist, I’ve also never necessarily been the type of person who feels a need to be surrounded by people or constantly making new friends. I was, honestly, perfectly content being on my own, and I enjoyed the time that this isolation gave me to get projects done, make art, and… wander the streets at night for hours and hours, blasting music in my earbuds.

That sounds really stupid, actually, and looking back, maybe it was. I don’t necessarily think I would give the same advice to a newcomer in Los Angeles. Or, maybe I would, but with a whole lot of disclaimers that you could very well be killed. In my defense, it was a very safe area right by my university, I never really wandered far enough to get lost or get into any sort of trouble. But every night after dinner, as the sun was setting earlier and earlier, as the season changed and got colder and colder each night, I would get a coffee or a soda and just walk for an hour or two or three through the city streets, listening to whatever music would strike my fancy. And, with the excitement that was still bubbling within me from the Chemlab show I had just recently attended, which I had come to view as a sort of symbol of this entire new chapter of my life, needless to say, I listened to a lot of Chemlab.

Everyone in the industrial music community seems aware of Burn Out at the Hydrogen Bar to some extent, or at the very least it has reached the level that it’s considered a required listen by most members of the subculture. And for good reason, since that album fucking rocks. It’s a classic, it’s explosive and energetic and gritty and fun, and you really can’t beat songs like “Codeine Glue & You,” “Suicide Jag,” or “Chemical Halo,” can you? And those are just the first three songs on the album! The Chemlab show I went to was a full playthrough of the entirety of Burn Out and I absolutely adored every second of it. But, that being said, as I wandered the dark midnight streets of Los Angeles and explored the new world that I had jumped into, it was a different Chemlab album that ended up striking the deepest chord in me: East Side Militia.

I find East Side Militia to be a tragically underrated album, perhaps because it did indeed follow in the wake of an album that’s more classically “high energy,” whereas East Side is not afraid to diversify into songs that are more lowkey in sound. It’s also not a long album; it clocks in at about an hour, and that’s including three remixes at the end, one of which takes up a whopping ten minutes of playtime. So, it ends up being about forty minutes of original tracks and three remixes. But within those forty-to-sixty minutes is an insane collision of so much variation of sound that, without fail, every time that I look at the track list I think, “Is that really it…?” There’s so much happening all the time in East Side that as a listener I feel like I’m constantly on my toes, constantly being thrown from moment to moment, and yet, in the end, it all comes together so beautifully as an art piece that is able to craft a world unlike any other.

At its core, East Side Militia feels like a twisted and complicated love letter to the city. It feels like a futuristic science fiction dreamscape backed by fast and danceable rock music, with lyrics full of drugs and sex and violence and wires and batteries and electric shocks. For a pretentious English major like myself it’s a feast: thematically complex, rife with imagery and language unlike anything else, and a perfect study in worldbuilding within an album. Although I would not call it a concept album, as it’s not coherent enough for such a label), it’s a strange amalgamation of metalwork and sounds and ideas that come together to bring to life a world both alien and distressingly familiar. For those who have found their home in the city streets it rings true in a way comparable to the Beat Generation’s Burroughs or Ginsberg, with grotesque and beautiful, magical and electrifying portraits of a world like our own but also so much stranger.

East Side Militia is comprised of eight tracks and one remix (though subsequent/reissued versions include a two extra remixes, as well), along with a few short “tracks” that are entirely silent:

1. Exile on Mainline
2. Jesus Christ Porno Star
3. Vera Blue (96/69)
4. Pyromance
5. Lo-Grade Fever
6. Electric Molecular
7. Latex
8. Pink
9. [silence]
10. [silence]
11. [silence]
12. [silence]
13. Exiled (“Suck on This” Mix)
14. Vera Blue (Remix by Pig)*
15. Exile on Mainline (Remix by Halo Black)*

*Reissue only

East Side’s opening track, “Exiled on Mainline,” starts with violence. Gunshots, screaming, threats. There’s no music yet, just the sample from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia saying: “I’ll kill you right there! Move when I say move, you motherfucker.” There feels like a little humor amidst the chaos, as that’s what spurs the music, which begins as a hard and fast pounding, as frantic as the imagery within the audio that prefaced it. Ultimately, “Exile on Mainline” invites its listener down the rabbithole and into the world that the rest of the album crafts with even more depth. A sense of tumbling down deeper and deeper into the lust for money, sex, love, drugs, coated with a sort of rock-n-role nihilism. This song functions incredibly as its own singular piece, but works perfectly as an introductory one as well, with its harsh opening audio and its ending refrain of “The record’s skipping,” which can read as a meta acknowledgement of the fact that this is, indeed, the introduction of an album.

The record skips and we’re whisked off quickly to “Jesus Christ Porno Star,” which is easily one of my favorite songs on the album and probably an all-time favorite from Chemlab in general. As the album forms a world for its listener, a number of the songs define characters for us, populating the industrial city that’s being injected into our imagination. “Jesus Christ Porno Star” is one of these characters. Our singer is a nihilistic, perverse preacher of some sort, singing to us about sex and sin, eroticizing violence, encouraging incest and molestation, crafting a vision of degeneracy and a sort of pessimistic nontheism view of the world. It’s a wicked track with salacious lyrics and it’s incredibly fun. As the song shifts into its second half, it slows down to something more lowkey, and the final few minutes are just a repetition of variations of the refrain, “I am nothing / You are nothing / We are nothing.”

“Jesus Christ Porno Star” alone is able to do more in the name of worldbuilding and merging together seamlessly dozens of ideas and images than most songs I can think of. Religion, power, lust, temptation, morality, sex and death… and I want to affectionately highlight how much I adore the last line in the song, which is, “I am nothing / You are nothing / We are nothing / Under the steel-belted sky.” Steel-belted sky? That was something I initially tried to Google, but, spoiler, you won’t find anything (well, except the lyrics to this song, hah). I love it, the image of the sleek metallic sky overhead. It’s language like that, Jared’s ability to invent new ideas and craft a world through strange and sometimes surreal imagery that connotes an electronic, industrial (electroindustrial, even!) cityscape, that really makes East Side Militia stand out and heightens the lyrics to something I would very readily call poetry.

Which leads us to “Vera Blue (96/69),” which does this even more. We’re presented with another character, an acquaintance of the prior song’s titular Jesus Christ Porno Star, in fact, according to the lyrics. After this we’ll move on beyond individual people, but I do enjoy that the album seems to start us off with a sort of character analysis of the city dwellers. This song starts off with one of my favorite opening lines in any song I can think of: “It’s 3:30am… all the streets are a blur / Heading for a wreck at the end of the world.” The listener is whisked away into this world of late night city streets and the characters that inhabit them. Although still a relatively high energy track, this song has a certain dreamlike characteristic to it, it’s very pretty and hypnotic in sound. Vera Blue herself is described in a way that makes her sound like some sort of android: “You can tell she’s hydraulic…” Louche sings, “You can see the mercury smear in her eyes…” How much of this is metaphor and how much of it is literal is up to the listener to decide.

On the topic of inventing new words to bring details from another world to life, “Vera Blue (96/69)” introduces the listener to the word “Andricon,” which is an entirely nonsense word that did not exist until Jared Louche sang it into existence. This is another word I Googled, and other than the song’s lyrics, you can find a lovely interview with Jared himself:

“‘Andricon’ is another in a string of words that I’ve made up. It’s an adjective that describes the style and sexuality of Vera Blue. I think that it’s important in the understanding of the word that know that [sic] Vera’s a construct of three women that I knew in New York; two drug dealers and a gun runner and Andricon was a way for me to describe those strange qualities about them/her that drew me. Very nocturnal, almost pathologically so. Plastically android-gynous yet still very human underneath…somewhere beneath the welded plates and wires. Make-up around her LEDs. Hope that helps.” [Source: “Chaos,” via Waste.org]

He says it best (and incredibly eloquently). Vera Blue as a character is an amalgamation of the android dystopian futurism that East Side feels so steeped in: this mysterious, metallic woman who exists in the darkness of the apocalyptic city streets. I stated earlier that the album feels in some ways like a love letter to the city, and I know perfectly well that “the city” is a broad statement: In my own narrative I spoke of Los Angeles, but I’m well aware that Chemlab’s reach extends far beyond that, touching the cities of industrial Chicago and the East Coast as well. When I say “city” I mean it in the broad sense of the city life, the culture and chaos that exists within these strange habitats so built upon the artificial. But more on that later.

We shift from “Vera Blue” to “Pyromance,” which is another one of my favorites. At its core “Pyromance” seems like a love song, as the title suggests, although the title quite obviously suggests that there’s a bit more involved here as well. This is one of the more laid back songs on the album, and I find it is as beautiful as it is melancholy and twisted. The lyrical imagery is striking, the song opens to what seems to be a couple dancing, undercut by vivid reminders of the album’s environment and the constant thematic echo of violence: “Lovely as a split lip / Soulful as the city / Move and skip / Swivel it,” Jared sings. As the song picks up the pace, laced through the lyrics are all of the standout themes of the album at once. Sex, drugs, violence, electronics, cars racing through city streets, humanity and lack thereof, and the way that all of these things intersect.

Much like the Andricon girl of “Vera Blue,” the chorus of “Pyromance” creates a vivid comparison between sex and robotics, so that electronic machinery and intimate bodily connection become one and the same: “My battery got a surge from my finger triggering your spark plug.” This is intensified by the chorus’ callback to the Beatles’ “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?”, which is famously about Paul McCartney’s experience witnessing two monkeys having sex in the street. He was amused and fascinated by how simple these interactions between animals were, in comparison to people and our complex social and interpersonal behaviors. When applied to the android world of East Side and in particular the interest in the human body as machine present in“Pyromance,” that theme of the complexity of humanity and human relations, including in comparison to the behavior of the entirely nonhuman, is not to be ignored. One can imagine the singer of this song as some sort of half-human android, struggling helplessly in understanding love, relation, and connection while so detached from humanity, emotion, and the often-arbitrary rules and expectations built by our society.

As “Pyromance” comes to an end, we’re presented with the slowest and most laid back of the tracks on the album, “Lo-Grade Fever.” This song has very few lyrics and feels like it exists in a sleepy haze. I quite like it but I also have little to add about it. It’s cool and a little bit sinister. It has some funk, some electronic noises, some nostalgic record scratchiness. It may catch you off guard (or not, this is Chemlab we’re talking about, after all) that as “Lo-Grade Fever” winds down and the chill atmospheric sounds crooning through your speakers comes to an end, in an instant you’ll be met with the explosive “Electric Molecular,” one of the highest energy and most danceable songs on the album (and also the shortest!).

“Electric Molecular” thrusts us right back into the heart of the album, with intense electric rock, and contrasted to one of the more deceptively upbeat tempos is the constant imagery of and allusion to drugs and the collapsing and bursting of industrial machinery. This song certainly seems like it’s primarily about substance abuse, with certain lyrics overtly implicating it with lines like, “Cannot block the signal from the battery to the brain / Cannot block the poison from the trigger to the vein,” paired with once again the usage of robotics and the theme of an android or otherwise fully or partially artificial humanity as metaphor for human existence. A man spiraling deeper into drug abuse or a machine intentionally overloading itself until it bursts? East Side Militia invites you again and again to consider how the intimate struggles of human existence mirror and tie into the automaton world that we live in. It’s fast, it’s exciting, and it’s quick to the point, which is impressive in and of itself, since there is not a single moment on this album that the ideas are thematically simple or easily digestible.

And now we’re at “Latex,” which briefly gives the false sense of more calm after the storm as the abrupt ending of “Electric Molecular” is met with a relatively gradual build, but once “Latex” hits… Jesus fucking Christ (porno star!). This song is completely insane, and another favorite. Although being fast-paced, high-energy, and crazy isn’t exactly a new concept for Chemlab, it feels like “Latex” takes it in a whole new direction and elevates it to new heights. It’s theatrical, it’s frenzied, it’s a deranged screeching rock explosion with Jared screaming out his lyrics somewhere between a maniacal supervillain and a deranged and frantic madman. I love “Latex.” It’s a collision that completely decimates any kind of musical coherence that the rest of the album has held together. It’s rock and roll. “I lost my sight to save my mind!” The chaos of the city, of rushing trains and bright lights, of guns and drugs and desperation and depression, batteries and radiation — “Latex” truly has it all.

As “Latex” winds down with a cry of, “It’s all over now!” the song fades out into a Christian hymn, blatantly irreverent in this case and, in my opinion, implicitly tying back to “Jesus Christ Porno Star” and the theme of sin, of corrupted morale, of lack of belief and the critical view on the church and religion that can be found in little echoes throughout the album. To end on a hymn telling the listener that God is here and all is calm and quiet is an ironic and sarcastic ending that both subverts the album’s prior themes, takes one last cynical jab at organized religion and society, and also, on a meta level, subverts the expectations of the sound of the album itself, as it’s a jarring difference from the expected industrial rock chaos that every song — “Latex” arguably most of all — has presented us.

But, we get one more little twist! It is not, as a matter of fact, “all over now.” There is one more non-remix track on the album, the record’s most glaring outlier, “Pink.”

A story, to mix things up a little: Here in Los Angeles, we have a cool local store that sells all sorts of Halloween and horror curio, from collectibles to houseware to party decorations. Picture one of those pop-up Halloween stores that appear every fall, but this is year-round and catering to people who make Halloween a lifestyle rather than a holiday. Perfect for a household of goths, so as you can probably imagine, I’ve spent a lot of time in there. The whole place is dripping with atmosphere to really heighten the experience, because Los Angeles is all about theatrics: Dim lighting, decorations, an entire room inspired by and decorated up like the Disneyland Haunted Mansion, etc. Rather than playing music throughout the store, as most stores would, in order to bring together the whole experience there is a never ending stream of audio from various classic Halloween-y flicks playing through the store.

Anyway, this is what “Pink” sounds like to me (as well as something a bit akin to something you might hear from The Velvet Underground, think “The Gift”). It’s a spooky and unnerving track, full of eclectic noises that absolutely scream “horror.” Pianos and ringing and distorted voices muffled beneath old record static. I once saw another reviewer call this song “too gothic,” and I think that’s hilarious but not necessarily wrong. At a first glance it is almost completely unrecognizably Chemlab. Jared is initially nowhere to be found, the vocals are largely taken over by Amy Gorman, performing what is less singing and more speaking, delivering the words of the song in a monotone drone that veers between slightly pained and then bored and then almost robotic, with some occasional subtle distortion or echo. Beneath this is ambiance and noise with a semblance of fleeting coherency.

“Pink” goes all over the place, the music and vocal delivery creating a sense of frantic semi-lucid rambling that the lyrics themselves only further, stringing along ideas that build upon each other and shapeshift easily from one thought to the next. For example: “It’s almost always raining, drizzling, misting, slightly, lightly, heavily / But almost always dripping / The kitchen faucet marking time.” Is it fully possible to decipher meaning from this? I assume it’s about the world, about the state of society, about trying to understand what’s real and what’s fake and what we have control over, what we can change, and what’s entirely futile and utterly out of our hands.

Gorman’s presence ends with an abrupt “Time is fiction,” after which the same lyric gets repeated by Jared, who finally makes a reappearance. I think, for the sake of fully conveying the impact, it’s worth quoting the entirety of the last words muttered on the album, which is: “Time is fiction / So, why don’t you come lay down with me / In this pitch-bending film loop / And let the acid rain beat down on our bodies?”

I love these final words. I adore them. It hints at something between defeat and acceptance, it’s both sobering and ethereal. In a song that feels so distant from the rest of the albums that it shares its space with, the acid rain feels like it once more grounds the song in the mythos of the rest of East Side as worldbuilding of a dimension much like ours but filled with the strange science fiction of a city filled with futuristic android technology and dystopian decay. The song has a few more minutes to spare of melodic ambiance before it winds down to eerie noise and then fades to nothing but total silence. A silence that is so significant that following “Pink” is, as mentioned prior, four tracks of nothing but silence. They really want you to have to sit with your thoughts for a moment, don’t they?

Initially, it took me a while to appreciate “Pink.” I was an impatient and immature little industrial baby that wanted to hear more songs like “Latex” or “Exile On Mainline,” not… whatever this was. It’s an ending that seems completely bizarre for a band like Chemlab, so seemingly intrinsically tied to rock and roll and industrial dance, but it just works so, so well. It’s weird, it’s uncomfortable. It’s out of place but it feels like it’s exactly where it should be. Ultimately, East Side’s daring to be so jarring and strange in its final moments is part of what propels it to being one of my favorite albums of all time.

The original version of the album contains one remix after the end, “Exiled (‘Suck on This’ Mix),” which is a remix of “Exiled on Mainline” that is longer and dancier but ultimately retains the core of what the original song brings to the table. I’m aware that the reissue and subsequent digital versions include two other remixes, “Vera Blue” remixed by PIG and “Exile on Mainline” remixed by Halo Black. Admittedly, I’m a bit picky about remixes and my opinions of remixes in general can be a bit complicated, though not at all wholly negative. I don’t necessarily consider these tracks apart of the “mythos” of the album, in the sense that I have little to add about them other than acknowledging that they exist and are worth a listen if you want to engage with all of the content that the album has to offer. They’re fun and interesting and hearing alternative versions of the tracks is always cool, so give ’em a listen, too.

One of the things that I love most about industrial music is how much it has a history of questioning the connection between mankind and nature, between the artificial and the organic. Artists like Skinny Puppy have produced completely iconic albums like “Too Dark Park” that deal largely with environmental degradation and the destruction of nature, all while making music with machines, or Coil’s fascination with creating timeless music that can connect the human experience through all of history using sounds both archaic and modern, both cold and electronic and whimsical and magical, or Einstürzende Neubauten making music out of garbage in the ruins of post-World War West Berlin. It really is no surprise that the genre and subculture really took off in the eighties, when science fiction on the screen was veering more and more into dystopia, and directors like Cronenberg were asking questions about the body and how it could be modified or manipulated through the advancements that our technological progression were careening towards. To me, East Side Militia encompasses so much of this and exists within this tradition of exploring the human existence and where we belong in a world in which we as a species seem to have one foot in the natural and one in the artificial.

I like that East Side doesn’t necessarily seem to be trying to answer any questions or give any resounding explanation to any of this. I don’t get the sense that we’re supposed to come away with a clear lesson, that we’re being lectured about some innate truth. If anything, it approaches much of its themes with a nihilistic apathy perhaps best summed up in the final half of “Jesus Christ Porno Star.” It’s an exploration, a suggestion of a world more fantastic than ours, yet it mirrors and commentates on the experience of our own human existence.

I certainly have no interest in speaking for Jared Louche, Dylan Thomas More, or anyone else involved in the creation of this album, nor am I trying to say that my read on it is the only correct one, or implying that I haven’t made some glaring oversight in my interpretations; it would be presumptuous and arrogant of me to act like I have all of the answers. I personally do not ascribe to “death of the author” as a theory for engaging with art and I have an absolutely enormous amount of respect for those involved, and I’m sure there are intimate meanings to be found within the album that I could not even pretend to know. But at the same time, this would hardly be an interesting writeup if I only deferred to the concrete, would it? And I believe the interpretation of the individual beholder is just as valuable as anything else. I would even argue that the relationship formed between creator and audience and how the art translates and distorts as the viewpoint shifts is one of the many things that makes art worthwhile in the first place.

To me, East Side Militia is wandering the nighttime streets, watching cars and bicycles and flashing ambulances and police cars rush past, sirens muffled by “Vera Blue” in my headphones. Moving from the middle of nowhere to the city gave me an awareness of how very human the city is. You’re surrounded at all times by this constant reminder that you are very, very not alone. Cities are compact and busy. Cars rush past at all hours. Residents of neighboring apartments shuffle around and open closets and speak in raised voices and you are never in complete isolation. The very soul of the city is human. Around us is the joy and the pain of thousands upon thousands of others, all existing at the same time, side by side. You can walk down any street at any time of day and chances are you’ll spot some sign of life. And among and around the humans are the metal machines that we have created, the tall, sleek buildings that we laid the foundation for. Our cars, our cellphones, the automatic doors, the escalators, the concrete we walk on — All of it is so very human; tools made for and by humans, to better our existence or worsen it, depending on the tool and how it’s being used.

This strange, artificial biome that humans have invented for ourselves on this planet and continue to develop rapidly as technology evolves and mutates is something that I am both enamored and intrigued by. I love the city, and I feel that it’s that love that makes me continue to return to East Side Militia again and again.

Album Personnel:

Jared Louche — Vocals, Lyrics, Guitar, Arrangements, Production, Writing

Dylan Thomas More — Composition, Programming, Arrangements, Sampling, Cover Art, Production, Writing

7S — Design

John “Serv-O” DeSalvo — Drums, Programming, Arrangements, Sampling, Writing

Zalman Fishman — Executive Production

William Tucker — Guitar, Writing

En Esch — Guitar

Greg “Cool Hands” Lucas — Guitar

Marc “BMB” LaCorte — Guitar

Critter — Production

Games Galus — Turntables

Sister Stella Soleil — Vocals

Geno Lenardo — Writing, Guitar

Soloman Synder — Bass

James Galus — Remix

You can support Chemlab by buying the album through Amazon, Apple Music, or pretty much anywhere you can buy an album online. It’s also available on Spotify (strangely mislabeled as “Easy” Side Militia) though I always recommend purchasing albums and supporting artists when possible. Although Chemlab itself doesn’t have an official Bandcamp, you can support Jared Louche’s latest musical endeavors by supporting the Dogtablet project here or by becoming a supporter of his Patreon. You can also connect with Chemlab and find links to Jared’s official Facebook page, Instagram account, etc, via the official website here.