Sleek, Stripped, and Technological: Vapor Transmission

SCORE: 96/100

'Vapor Transmission' is an album that I've been meaning to get to for a while now, with 'Fiction' becoming one of my absolute definitive, all time favorite songs from any artist or any album of all time. The album cover as well as this one song alone help to set the futuristic, stripped yet noisy soundscape and atmosphere held by this album, with Orgy using a sleek industrial/cyber combination to set the stage for this project and its sound.


This album has heavier sounds than I expected with a huge usage of synth lines and various, gritty acts of instrumentation that bring the album above other industrial albums by a longshot. The futuristic, cyber metal sound of 'Vapor Transmission' is even more alluring than I could've expected it to be, and Orgy managed to make themselves one of my favorite bands with this album alone.


Orgy managed to make a less extreme sound for industrial rock/metal, with more sleek soundscapes and a focus on a highly tech-based aesthetic makes this unlike any other albums in the genre. It strips the noise of industrial and allows for something much more mechanically inclined, leading the band into a much sleeker direction than most other industrial acts.


The songs feel so truthfully cinematic in nature it's hard not to replay them again and again immediately. Songs like 'Fiction' and 'Eva' have such strongly welded atmospheres that they're impossible to resist, and the entire album keeps the same consistency up while still being hugely packed with variety. 


'Vapor Transmission' does suffer slightly from having obvious standouts that make the other tracks seem less memorable, but the rest of the songs are still enjoyable enough to be just as worthwhile as the bigger songs on this hidden gem of an album. It's an underappreciated highlight for the entire industrial genre, and it's a sophomore triumph for the band. It's a much more melodic project in nature - and it does the band all the favours in the world.


It's a perfect timepiece for the year 2000 in terms of how technology was budding even higher in the Y2K era, with computers, phones, and the internet on the rise - the atmosphere of this album feels near-perfect for the period of time it belongs to. It's rare that a rock album has this much atmosphere, and it has a truly futuristic, almost sci-fi-esque sound to it that I haven't found anywhere else.


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