Ice Ages are a one man project courtesy of Richard Lederer, who may well be familiar with you due to his participation in the Lord Of The Rings obsessed Summoning. Apparently he is also well known for being in Die Verbannten Kinder Evas as well and if you have heard of them congratulations, I certainly have not. This is the third Ice Ages album and it is quite a different musical experience than Summoning, rather than taking you to the plains of Mordor and battlefields of Helms Deep it almost flings you out into the vacuum of deepest space. Ice Ages are labelled as playing ‘melodic industrial darkwave’ which strikes as a pretty good description to me as the dark synthesized plateau of this music is deep and involving stuff.
After a clanking and martial sounding industrial intro that had me actually thinking this was going to solely be an instrumental affair we are taken into the realms of the title track. Although no doubt using state of the art equipment (apparently Richard explored new software synthesizer Reaktor 5) this has a retro feel to it mainly no doubt as it takes me back to the bands playing this sort of style in the 90s’. Vocals here are distorted, cold and unemotional sounding, the pace of the music is slow and unhurried as atmosphere is built. You find yourself kind of waiting for it to explode but that does not really happen at all over the whole length of the album and you are better off just immersing yourself and going with the flow.
Although not particularly up on this style of music and what is going on in the clubs right now, this strikes as nothing new and groundbreaking, chances are you will have heard this sort of stuff before and it reminds me of Controlled Bleeding, Das Ich and bands of that ilk. ‘From Grey To….’ Utilises that age old Tubeway Army sound to good effect and the clanking slow distorted vocal delivery makes the whole thing feel alien and robotic as though it has escaped from a Philip K Dick novel. The constant battle clank of the album kind of makes me think of that great scene in Terminator where the robots take over and there is a clinical mindset about the stomp of numbers such as ‘Through The Mirror’ that suggest that an unstoppable army of mass destruction is on the way.
There is not a huge amount of diversification going on either pace or sound wise here and at times this just has you drifting off as though it is futuristic mood music. Not sure if this is going to be up for many repeated listens from me, perhaps if I’m around in the year 2525 it might be a different matter. Check out the tracks on the site and see what you think.
http://www.myspace.com/officialiceages
http://www.iceages.info
