Yeah, I am a bit late to have an ear on this one... the French Electro/Industrial producer Vince Pujol returns with his newest full-length album “Into Darkness” under his well-known Electro Synthetic Rebellion moniker, which is at least his 8th releases in more than two decades. So Vince can be seen already as a veteran producer and he still spits out an excellent formulated arsenal of highly thrilling Dark Electro / Industrial music.

“Into Darkness” picks up the era after his last album “Machines of Destruction” in 2017 and it has been again signed to the Hungarian label Advoxya Records. The collaboration with this label has been always fruitful as Vince could re-release his early classic albums “Distorted Visions” (2001) and “Corroded Fragments” (2003) each re-mastered and extended with a bonus disk which features the non-released self-produced demo-albums “Rebirth” and “Entropy” through the years. Well, it has been a while when he was lastly presented here on our site.

ESR in the year 2021 also celebrates the anniversary of the debut album “Distorted Vision” originally released 2001 by the German label Wire Production which went off from business far too early. So you'll find a new re-recorded version of his classic and meaningful track “Reanimate (Reminiscence)”. Well, at least and with through all the years of Vince's activity I have stopped to count the numbers of different versions and remixes of this tune.

Asides his pounding and blasting high-tech sci-fi related sound outfit provided in his very own signature, what else is actually new here? Actually not too much. Vince generally remains faithful in his style and leaves out bigger musically surprises. So you'll get again the full dose of driving Dark Electro/Industrial music filled with modern sounds, hammering kick-and-snare-works, vibrating bass line sequences and skillfully produced synth textures. To use highly pitched fx-manipulations on his vocals like in his earlier days he has meanwhile completely given up. So to hear Vincent's real voice in between his tracks is somewhat unusual, nearly too “human”-sounding compared to his music. Here and there I would recommend him to return to his classic roots.

New to me is his love for more spherical sound ambiances and the will to create filmic interruptions with some instrumental tracks like “Mechanical Nightmare” and/or “Lost”. It seems to me that Vince tends to install more and more of this movie score-like instrumental tunes after he has started this kind of work with the second CD “The Cinematic Tracks” available on the limited edition of to the last ESR album “Machines of Destruction”. It is generally noticeable that almost half of the 13 featured tracks are instrumental tunes. Best tracks and pretty much infiltrated with Vince's strongest ability, the programming of futuristic, ice-cold synthesizer-pads, are to me “Broken”, “Worms of Darkness” and the opener “Too Late” as they are counting to his most accessible works on here. More drastically dancefloor action he then provides with the fast-pacing “Breakdown”, “The Awakening of Machines” and the last tune “Dark Forces”.

ESR in the fall 2021 and after more than 20 years of activity acts musically in the known paths and avoids a musically risk or brings up something extravagant new to his style and the Dark Electro / Industrial music genre generally. It's not and has never been a question of the quality he offers track by track and album by album, but I would like to encourage him here and there to bring up a something completely surprising element or to try a musically flirt with a different style or genre.