Chiildren play around, release record

Under the guise of invention, metal has quietly stagnated. When a metal band wants to take a leap of faith outside the bubble of its genre, it needs a fancy new genre label in order to legitimize it.

With names like “adventure metal” and “cinema-grind,” the umbrella of metal can get downright ridiculous. However, the catch is that new genres are rarely good.

The wacky genre-naming convention certainly applies to Los Angeles’ Chiildren, who’ve claimed the label “post-industrial,” which certainly doesn’t mean much.

After considering industrial music’s breadth and array of instrumental input, “post-industrial” made me chuckle a bit: It seemed that Chiildren, along with their new EP, The Other People, were doomed before note one escaped my speakers.

While it’s certainly easy to pigeonhole Chiildren into the try-and-fail category based on classification alone, let it be known: The Other People bucks these expectations and certainly does its part to eliminate genre prejudice across the board.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the band (though it shouldn’t be) is that it is composed of just two people. While this news is nothing unto itself, it gets intriguing when you learn that the two men who are Chiildren are male porn stars.

They are known professionally (i.e. at their nine-to-fives) as Danny Wylde and Vin Vericose. In the case of Chiildren, they’re known by their real names: Chris Zeischegg and Chad Fjerstad.

Chad’s name is one you might recognize, depending how up on metal personnel you are. In another life, far away from LA, he was the bass player for Dead to Fall. Zeischegg has no prior notable musical background outside of singing for a handful of LA-based metal bands.

Both met while shooting pornography for Vivid Alt, a subsidiary of Vivid Entertainment that features performers with tattoos and piercings, something most mainstream pornography does not.

It is perhaps this connection that allows Chiildren to be what it is: a nihilistic crash-up of black metal, industrial music and even trance.

One thing you will notice after going through some of The Other People is that the post-industrial moniker actually fits. If you were lured to this band, as I was, after seeing the video for “Girl in the Dirt,” you’ll be glad to know that the remainder of the EP pays true homage to its genre, with plenty of electronics sprinkled throughout.

In fact, The Other People is so impregnated with synths and other electro-goodies that the band sounds like a younger, cleaner Genghis Tron. Really, a lot of The Other People evokes much of Genghis Tron’s debut EP, Cloak of Love.

That is to say, it was the calm before the storm, as Genghis Tron released Dead Mountain Mouth a year later to near-unanimous critical acclaim. Cloak of Love was the underdeveloped precursor to one of the best albums of 2006, and it is my opinion that The Other People is of similar merit.

On first listen, one thing stands out above all else—for black metal, or in this case, black-metal-inspired music, the songs are incredibly short.

No song on the record scrapes below the three-minute mark, but when a track takes half its length to build tension and explode, the payoff is supposed to be much more indulgent. While this can easily be attributed to stylistic choice, a sudden stop takes listeners out of the experience immediately.

Unfortunately, this formula is at its most glaring on “Girl in the Dirt,” the single and leadoff track. The buildup finally gives way to the meat of the track at the halfway point. After such an intense buildup, you’re expecting a similar conclusion, but you never get it.

In fact, the final track on the record, “Post Misogyny” executes a similar strategy, albeit more glaringly: The track doesn’t truly hit its metal stride until there are a mere 43 seconds left.

Fortunately, at face value, Chiildren delivers the goods. Not one of the tracks on The Other People is a clunker, and each track feels like a completely different backing band with the same singer.

Some tracks feel like some of the more ambient cuts from the Nine Inch Nails catalog, while other tracks, like the titular “Other People,” sound like a slice of Depeche Mode without the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of vintage synthesizers at work.

“Other People” takes its time establishing a groove before it goes full-on Combichrist-inspired industrial electro. Zeischegg wails from behind a smoke screen of reverb and bells, and that’s the beauty of the record: It sounds like Zeischegg and a rotating cast of very diverse musicians made a sweet metal record, but it’s not.

Such striking diversity can only speak to Fjerstad’s incredible versatility as a musician.

It’s the total package that makes The Other People sound like an extremely polished effort from two relative unknowns. In fact, if it weren’t for Zeischegg’s coarse vocals and some mysterious element that threads this record together, The Other People sounds like it could be a sampler from some record label that deals in stuff like this.

Though it’s been somewhat heavily publicized that Zeischegg and Fjerstad—or in this case, Wylde and Vericose—are porn stars and therefore this band should be avoided, I ask you to lay down your initial prejudices about the record and give it a shot—much like I did when I saw it labeled post-industrial.

You may be pleasantly surprised.