Tolchock - Elements of Rage

Wow. I had completely forgotten about Tolchock, haven't heard a single track from them for probably 15 years now, but here they are, back with their brand new album 'Elements of Rage'. Back in the days, they have released albums on Swedish labels like Energy Rekords and COP International, but this time they stand strong on their own and released this album themselves both as CD and digital from their Bandcamp.

The Swedes from up north has a nice mix of EBM and Industrial in the way they used to make it back in the 90's. The mix between female and male vocals works great and it's nice to hear that they stay away from the whole Within Temptation thing with the beauty and the beast kind of way with female beautiful vocals going over to the male grunt. Jenny Runa's vocals are just as aggressive as Jens Persson's.



'Elements of Rage' has a couple of decent tracks where "Time to Breathe", "Selfextractor", "Firecell" and "Down in the hole" stands out. What they have in common is their strong choruses that helps in making these tracks memorable. But overall, the album comes off quite plain and the tracks are similar enough to kind of stick together into a 60 minute track, with the few exceptions above. There's a couple of remixes by Swedish artists as well, such as Machinista, Red Mecca, Biomekkanik and Blipp!

The album was nice for a couple of weeks spontaneous listening, but I have a feeling that after this review, this is probably not an album I go back to. Perhaps we meet again Tolchock, in another 15 years or so.
May 08 2015