The Industrial Twilight: No Return

Saturday, August 22, 2020

No Return - "Machinery" [2002]

Artist: No Return

Title: Machinery

Genre: Industrial Death/Thrash Metal

Country: France
Year: 2002

Track List:

Machinery
The Recycler
Violator
Synthetic
Disillusion
Virus
Resurrection
Disease
Dynamo
The Last Act
Biomechanoid
Secret Face (Death cover)

No Return are widely regarded one of the biggest French trash metal acts, started as early as in 1984 under the name Evil Power before changing it in 1989. Honestly I'm not familiar with their early works at all (and the whole 80s French metal scene is still mostly a terra incognita for me), but this album was a pretty interesting find. Its sound has been described as a mix of Kreator, (old) Fear Factory, and melodic death metal of the Swedish school, with a lot of electronic music influences. While I can't call "Machinery" a masterpiece, as it's definitely not as innovative as the early works of Fear Factory, Nocturnus, or Oxiplegatz (whom No Return also were compared to), yet it's still very decent and rather overlooked industrial death/thrash metal release with a pronounced futuristic theme.

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About this blog

I created this blog mostly because I wanted to practise my English skills, and to showcase the industrial, gothic, punk, metal, neofolk and progressive rock scene of Russia/ex-USSR and Eastern Europe (especially Hungary) in the meanwhile.

As you can see, this blog doesn't take itself seriously enough, but I hope I'm doing good enough with my reviews even if my proficiency in English is limited. Along with the aforementioned stuff from Eastern Europe, I occasionally post some classic and rare albums that aren't to be missed, and generally whatever I want. Other categories of note:

* finno-ugric rarities - various music (including pop) in minor Finno-Ugric languages which I'm interested in because of my heritage. The music from Hungary, Finland and Estonia can be found under the respective categories;

* lo-fi - various poorly recorded demos from before 2000 that are of historical importance. Most of these demos come from the USSR era, so you might want to check out the USSR category as well.

As of now, I try to post only music that has already been made free by the artists themselves, or the rare old releases that are out of print. But if you're an artist and would like me to remove the download links of your work, just contact me using the form below.

Sorry, I don't do reviews by request, I don't have the time. Moreover, I think the bands that feel the need to advertise themselves by sending their demos to as many blogs as possible are usually just plain boring. If you want to contact me for any other reason, use the contact form below.

It should be obvious enough that reviewing anything on here doesn't equals endorsement of artists' personal views. This especially concerns neofolk and martial industrial. It'd be fair enough to say that I have the same approach to the political and religious topics in these genres as Laibach do.

Many of the female musicians featured on my blog are amateur models, and in many cases their modelling work is no less interesting than their music. Right now I'm working on giving it a separate section of the blog (just in case if anyone wants my review to be only about their music and not their looks). The work is in progress, check back later if you're interested.

The title of my blog comes from a song by The Kovenant (album "SETI", 2003).