Elegant Form - Operation V

Over the last Two months, I've been inadvertently growing an Epic Beard. I never knew why until I started to write this review - turns out I needed something to claw at and scratch ad infinitum.

This is the 5th album by Jan Pollok and occasionally, Selina Hirschfeldt (Elegant Form), and for most of you, the only one you'll be aware of (with the exception of 2007's "Endzeit").

So why the beard molestation? Firstly, I hate 2xCD releases. Secondly, the track order is completely fucked up. All EF releases have a tendency to put various remixes and re-works of older songs on each release, in between tracks, at the start of discs, wherever the hell they like. It makes for a rare occasion when the shuffle button on your media system actually doesn't cause any fluidity to be lost.

Elegant Form are best described as being on the "hardside" of Electro-Industrial, with minimal Techno influence (but not quite enough to be TBM). That's apparent immediately with the first of these 31 (!) tracks : "Hellraiser (Dark Pain Mix)".

Get up and wipe the despair away, this is NOT yet another cover of the Suicide Commando song. Actually, it's as fast and danceable as the SC version, but with a much more resonant and ear-raping synth.

I need to be honest, the music is without fail, almost genial and outstanding. The track order and lack of clarity is a huge, huge turn off (Not in the sexual way).

There's Rhythmic Noise, Electro-Industrial, TBM, Dark Electro, and Aggrotech influences channeling through this record like a spectrum of Electronics and Distortion - to the point where instead of meeting clear glass and forming a white light (like the Science experiments your class did at school when you were off behind the bikeshed), the impact almost shatters all preconceptions and notions of this sound.

Elegant Form is... something of a paradox. I've never heard anything as amalgamated as this, yet everything sounds like it has been done before. If you even think I'm going to do a track by track of half of this album, you can think again (after all, this isn't a Book), but I think it safe to say you won't have any idea how this sounds after reading my review (I'm good at that).

There's no doubt something for everyone here, and song titles vary from the Shoegaze and Triphop Influenced "Pianodream" to the Dark Electro and Occultist "Satanic Mass".

Where Disc 1 was hard, Industrial, and unforgiving, Disc 2 is soft, trancy, synthpoppy, and has 80s elements.
Elegant Form, perhaps, didn't want to settle on a subgenre and alienate fans of Industrial, so they've made an album incorporating EVERYTHING.

31 tracks. Possibly 31 different styles. How the hell do I score this?

Simple : It gets an 8. Enough to interest each of you in someway. Whether that interest is held, I do not know, but like "Infaust", "Progression", "Endzeit", and "Indust" before it, "Operation V" is another slab of German ingenuity, and perhaps 2011 is the year where this band actually manages to become slightly more than a pub quiz name. May 22 2011