Mlada Fronta, a project from France that released the last album on Flatline Recordings is back with a stunning double-CD in some very nice packaging. The CD-box has store for two different CDs and a thick booklet (20 pages) containing some nice industrial art. The music of Mlada Fronta has grown up since the last release “High Tension”. While on this earlier release a lot of the sounds were produced with standard-samples and was partly boring due to this fact, “Fe2 O3” is a surprisingly interesting album with two faces.
The first CD contains dark ambient sounds with 12 brilliant soundtrack-like music and three remixes of the bands Dither, Orphx and Savak as add-on. The music appears often as threatening and gloomy, industrial scratches are mixed between the spherical and heavy sound-layers and Mlada Fronta knows how to create sounds fitting to the pictures in the cover-booklet.
The second CD is a more rhythmic approach to the music and features a lot of danceable beats, driving drum-patterns and some smashers that could be compared to tracks like “Ire” of Imminent Starvation. Track 5 for example is over 9 minutes long, features a hammering beat, thick sound-layers create tension and some scratchy climaxes tear apart the almost hypnotizing atmosphere of this track. For sure something you will hear in the clubs soon. I did not use the song-titles here because it seems to be some chemical coding and track names like “XE 131.3” are not really explanatory. The whole album seems to follow a certain concept.
Mlada Fronta’s album with the strange name “Fe2 O3” knows how to attract fans of rhythmical industrial music and ambient and combines both sound-worlds in a brilliant way. One part of the music seems to be related to the “good old” bombast-sounds of Imminent Starvation or Synapscape in the late 90ths and the other part is innovative and unique. The most interesting fact is that Mlada Fronta did not only use distorted industrial-samples and noises, but also a lot of clear, melodic and spherical elements in their music. The rich sound will be a pleasure to a lot of different tastes and the two CDs hold enough material for a long listening-session. This is a good reason to nominate the album, album of the year 2002.