Ambassador21

INV002 (C)&(P) Invasion

CD / Digital album

Digital version available on Bandcamp and all the rest best digital stores

Hailing from Belarus, AMBASSADOR 21 delivers a hard piece of electronic and industrial chaos. This is a production full of fast rhythms and anarchistic structures that intermixes a diversity of various styles that merge together Punk, industrial, experimental and electro. The opening cuts are definitely too bombastic and chaotic for my taste and the screaming male and female vocals only reinforces this state of disorder. The 6th track brings some change through a recognizable sampling from a live perfomance of FRONT 242. The style here moves into the more electronic fields, but don’t expect to get your usual plate of EBM. Once again, AMBASSADOR 21 feels this need to inject the torturing chaos, which sounds very much like a trademark. The next piece moves into an atmospheric ambiance while the rhythmic comes close to D&B. Track 8 briefly steers the album into a pure acid treatment. This is definitely my favourite cut, but it’s a pity that it’s a very short one! The more you walk through this universe, the more you get faced with new influences and new enigmas! The sound of AMBASSADOR 21 is for sure different from the usuals standards, but it will not be easy for this Russian band to convince others with this kind of electronic-punk!

I mentioned this in my last review for the Belarus based Ambassador 21 but I still find their mix of old school EBM and cold wave with misbehaving raver pants digital hardcore culture and cross border culture spew an odd if novel take on hardcore. Other acts like SMP (which I loathe musically) or even late frothing politicos like EBN have tried to take the tired EBM formula and update it with some punk rock anger but these have pretty much all failed miserably as moving beyond the stylistic jail they started out from. Digital hardcore came at it from a raver background with far more success and now A21 are trying to meet both of the attempts halfway it would seem. “People Vs. Ambassador 21” is straddling a divide which for me personally would be very uncomfortable being as wide apart as elitist synth pop and drunken fuck shit up punk rawk are philosophically. It doesn’talways work but it’s more than weird enough to keep your attention.
First off, A21 deserve props for sticking mainly to their native tongue. As incomprehensible as Russian is to my sheltered western brain, it has far more legitimacy than broken english poetry, especially considering the “revolution” angle of the music in question. So except for a cover of “The Kids Are United” plus a couple of others, the majority of the 15 tracks on offer are native tongue only. Likewise with most of the packaging; you do get a few lyrics in engrish to get the general idea going but most localization is kept intact which is refreshing. It’s my fault I didn’t learn another language like Russian, not theirs.
The 51 minutes here are shared amongst 15 tracks ranging between abuot 2 and 6 minutes in length with most under the 4 minute mark. The pace is mostly pretty brisk but there is very little sledgehammer gabber or speed freak jungle to be had and the almost exclusively 4/4 metronome out yells any attempts otherwise. Unlike a lot of hardcore based efforts, there is very little obvious pillaging going on samplage wise. In fact, there is very little melodic content at all with tunless goth-metal guitars millling about with hard to hold fragments of Rebirth, random sound fonts (very Sound Blaster sounding), short fragments of edgey mystery beats and general elusiveness. There are definitely rockin’ moments (quite a lot) but it seems more like a short attention span channel surfer looking for a Discovery Channel special on either punk rock, cheezy metal or “cyber punk” than a band trying to create lasting anthems.
The instrumentation here is totally fucked up, like ordering a pesto pizza and getting a feta and artichoke dairy Queen “Treatza” with a side of dayglo fuzzy dice. One moment the listener will be bopping about to bargain basement TB303 samples and general MIDI percussion and the next a Commodore 64 will get all hot and bothered with cheeze dripping Barney Miller slap bass and beyond wanky metal solos. It’s silly Rammstein gothic, it’s heartfelt Subhumans anger (the British one), it’s shitty techno from a Hong Kong gangster movie, it’s the beepy game music from “Ninja Gaiden”, it’s fetish gear at the club, it’s a chorus of “fuck you” followed by the crash of a bottle through a window afterwards. In other words it is it’s utterly confused really which is actually a good thing in case you were in doubt. What it lacks in genre coherency translates mostly into freshness and what doesn’t is generally carried by the release’s enthusiasm or dies off quickly enough to not totally alienate.
The only expected sounds really are from the vocal side which despite being delivered with stylistic predictibility are totally satisfying in a way that even Atari Teenage Riot never really achieved. It lacks the whininess of some rant based acts and also avoids being overly cutesy (no girly girl panty shots to be had here). The interplay is such that it makes me want to grab my better half by the hands and run out the door screaming “Revolution Is A Business!” in salute and unlike many DHR releases the female involvement seems integral instead of the condescending stripper side show of Shizuo (for example). Amazingly, their cover of “The Kids Are United” has somehow survived the ghetto of suckdom – it’s totally fucking cool which seems as implausible an outcome as if they had chosen to cover “Louie Louie” or “I wanna be your dog”. It’s the “Destroy 2000 Years of Culture” for this album for sure.
So after several listenings I still really do not know what to think other than perhaps “good on ya!” for these Belarus folks. The blender mechanics behind the wheel for sure get an A+ for effort and enthusiasm and it does sound like they are having good time fucking shit up in the old country. But like talking to drunk people, it’s probably easier to take in extended doses if you yourself are in a similar state so I expect the appeal will be strongest to those already heavily aligned with digital hardcore, latterday Euro gothic (i.e. tree metal) tendencies or even beepy EBM camps. For the rest of us only time will tell how well the novelty factor holds up so in the mean time I hope that Ambassador 21 refine their approach.

In a time when ATARI TEENAGE RIOT seems well and truly dead and Alec Empire lost himself in the corridors of international corporate business, the new digital-hardcore generation is here, and not necessarily where you would have waited for! From the depths of the ex-soviet-empire rises AMBASSADOR21, and they are the perfect heirs to the DHR gang. Heirs, who, far from living on a past capital and simplistic receipts, widely transcend the bases of digital hardcore : all ingredients are here (aggressive rythms, lo-fi sounds, ultra-overdriven guitar bits), but used in real songs, where ear-hammering is no palliative to lack of inspiration. The voices of Natalia and Alexey (mostly in russian) mix perfectly, on top of that crawling sound mayhem, and real feelings pervade from their music, not just anger and frustration. That’s not very surprising when one reads the list of their inspirations, where SWANS meet PANACEA, COIL or LARD.
“People Vs. Ambassador21″, with its numerous dance / new-wave / EBM references, is maybe their most accessible record, somewhat closer (even if the sound is sharply harder) to the electroclash scene ; some tracks (please, do not ask me which ones, everything is written in Cyrillic!) made me think of KAS PRODUKT, LORDS OF ACID or CHIKS ON SPEED. An electro-pop / wave road abandoned by ATARI TEENAGE RIOT after their first album, and that AMBASSADOR21 investigates brilliantly. A ” melodic ” approach to digital hardcore which does not prevent this record from being pure concentrated dancefloor-savagery; a record which is at the same time sexy, scary and politically-conscious.