Album: "Patient Zero " (2000)
Label: Bloodline
Style: Electro industrial / EBM
Songs: 10

Reviewed by: Darklight

Controlled Fusion is a Dennis Ostermann (In Strict Confidence) project. I will admit that I didn’t care for Controlled Fusion’s debut release, so I never followed them after that album. However, I heard that this latest offering from them was quite good, so I decided to give it a try. I’m glad that I did because it is an impressive release. But, unfortunately, it does have some problems. But I will address those later in the review.

Let me first point out that this band doesn’t really sound like In Strict Confidence. While you can recognize Dennis’ voice, he does sing quite differently here. Basically, this is a rather angry and aggressive straight forward floorfilling dark EBM act. The music is extremely energetic with frantic electronic programming and relentless beats. Dennis sings with raw emotion shouting out the lyrics with power. Songs such as “War”, “Drugfall”, “My Vision” and “Absent” especially stand out, and are the album’s best tracks. Even the somewhat synth-poppy cover of “Hit That Perfect Beat” works well here for a little touch of diversity. But where the album has its problems is with the two instrumentals “Galaxy Constellation”, “Psychological Way” and the final song “Steel Town”. The two instrumentals are dark ambient/experimental tracks that, while good and well placed, are too long dragging on for nearly ten minutes each. The closing song “Steel Town” is a decent song, but doesn’t really seem to fit with anything else here as it’s more of an experimental techno/trance track with dreary altered vocals that talk out the lyrics instead of actually singing them. The fact that it’s also about ten minutes long hurts it even more making the album end in a rather dull fashion. So what starts off as an in-your-face industrial assault album slowly turns into a mellow experimental album toward its closing. Amazingly, the band actually pulls this off rather well due to the track layout.

My main complaint here is that ten minutes is a bit too long for any song, especially slow and mellow instrumentals. But this shouldn’t turn you away from this CD as it does flow rather smoothly from beginning to end. It’s just that you might have to sit through a couple of songs for longer than you would actually like. But the bottom line is that there are so many great songs to be enjoyed here that no fan of heavy dark angry and aggressive european electro-industrial/EBM should pass on it.

Album: "Unnatural Causes" (1996)
Label: Cleopatra Records
Style: Electro industrial
Songs: 9

Reviewed by: Darklight

This is a German electro industrial band that sounds a lot like Evils Toy. However, they aren't quite as good. They are very generic and don't do anything new. The music is created with synths, electronics, drum machines, samples, and distorted vocals. It's your typical fast paced and catchy German industrial music. I don't feel that we needed another band to come along and imitate Lećther Strip, :wumpscut:, and Evils Toy. Why would a band want to sound like so many other bands before them? You would think that they would at least bring something new to the music. But Controlled Fusion is content with just copying a sound as opposed to creating one. They're not bad. Every song is energetic and angry. But you have already heard this same exact music several times before.