IN COVERT is a band based in Los Angeles, California, United States. Their music covers a range of moods, from dark and atmospheric to upbeat and danceable and, at times, angry and heavy. Their sound is reminiscent of alternative music from the 80s and 90s, and their music would not feel out of place in a goth club. Their debut album, Bleak Machinery, exemplifies these sounds in a blend of death rock, industrial, grunge, and post-punk sounds.
The album features 12 tracks and a runtime of just over 30 minutes, a perfect amount of time for the listener to take this atmospheric journey. The first track, “Blood Moon Rises,” serves as a synth-focused intro, setting the mood for the album with a dark, droning chord played under various unsettling noises and samples that make you feel like you are entering a horror movie. “Blood Moon,” the first official song of the album, introduces a dark wave style sound with a catchy lead synth accompanied by heavy bass and a 4/4 drum machine beat, taking apparent influence from post-punk music of the 1980s, such as The Sisters of Mercy. The vocals feature a distorted and harsh tone reminiscent of industrial music. The track descends into a synth-focused outro before softly fading out.
This quiet outro is quickly disrupted by the heavy guitar-focused intro of “Nowhere to Turn.” This third track of the album introduces a sound reminiscent of the Seattle grunge scene of the 1990s. With vocals at times channeling the tone and range of Layne Staley and heavy alternative metal-style riffs mixed with a post-punk-style rhythm section, the band creates a unique sound unlike anything I have heard before. Noisy and heavy distorted guitars are driven by a strong drum machine-based beat and a thick, driving bassline.
The bass becomes even more prominent on “Shivers Down the Spine,” immediately opening the song with a slightly distorted, hard-hitting, heavy bassline. The drum machine beats become heavier and more aggressive, distancing from earlier songs’ dancey, reverb-tinged post-punk beats into a harsh industrial sound. The track feels reminiscent of 90s industrial metal, like something off Nine Inch Nails’ class EP Broken. The song has an overall dark, harsh, and depressive sound, like a desperate walk through Hell.
“The Truth is Out There” is another instrumental track like “Blood Moon Rises” and leads us to the halfway point of the album with track 6, “Night Cavity.” The goth rock-influenced basslines return early in the song before the track embraces a brighter, poppier, more accessible alt-rock sound around the chorus, more reminiscent of genres between noise rock and pop rock. The vocals greatly contrast the aggressive tone of the previous song, with a clean poppy vocal throughout most of the track before the song introduces some metalcore style fry screams similar to bands such as Eighteen Visions.
“Dead Weight” again has a goth-ier and heavier sound, with heavy instrumentals and fry screaming. The clean vocals, this time, take influence from more mainstream hard rock and nu-metal acts such as Deftones, with a light tinge of distortion. The track is followed by another instrumental, the 32-second-long “Gates of Hell,” a haunting and unsettling ambient noise track that feels like a harsh descent into darkness.
Track 9, “Darkfields,” presents a punkier sound reminiscent of death rock bands. The bassline, in particular, would not be out of place on Christian Death’s classic debut album, Only Theater of Pain. It features heavy and aggressive sounds both instrumentally and vocally. If the previous track was an arrival in Hell, this track is the soundtrack to a fight with the Devil himself.
“Ominous Dreams” is another instrumental track featuring a haunting piano over a dark buzzing synth that made me picture being covered by wasps. The piano melody transfers to the next track, “Death Embers.” The song features the most aggressive vocals on the album, with plenty of screaming, including a repeated use of the phrase “fuck you,” which clearly highlights the singer’s anger.
“Cemetery Nights” is the album’s final track. It features a death rock-style bassline and beat, some more of the clean vocals from earlier, and screamed and distorted vocals, sometimes featuring both at the same time. The track is a strong end to the album, with catchy vocal hooks and a style featuring many of the sounds previously heard on the album into one track that brings everything together into a solid resolution.
Overall, I’d recommend this album to fans of goth rock and industrial music as well as to open-minded fans of other genres of alternative rock. The album really takes you on a journey, like a dance party that brings you through Hell itself. You can purchase the album digitally or on vinyl on Bandcamp!
Written by Naomi Niemiec
