It seems improbable that Bill Leeb has come this far without creating a solo album. The former Skinny Puppy keyboardist has spent four decades making music as Front Line Assembly. He has had global hits as a member of Delerium. Collaborations have led to productions as Intermix, Noise Unit, Cyberaktif, Equinox, Fauxliage, and Pro>Tech. Now comes news that the Vienna-born, Vancouver-raised maestro has finally released an album of his own.
Model Kollapse is named for the tendency of artificial intelligence systems to fall apart when asked to look at data regressively. Just as photocopies become blurred in subsequent generations, the data in AI systems decomposes and generates false results. Keep that in mind, the next time that you place your reliance on the decision-making of machines.
Leeb’s musical journey really began with Skinny Puppy – a band he left in 1986 to pursue a different vein of hard-edged electronic music. Where the Puppies focussed on gothic and horror imagery, Front Line Assembly took its inspiration from political events, social themes, and science fiction. Model Kollapse owes something to the early tapes that Leeb put together in his bedroom on Canada’s Left Coast, but it is also thoroughly modern in its absorption of darkwave, EBM, and hard electronica.
The opening track, “Demons,” finds Leeb warning “how much darkness and evil exist in the world, some of it created via technology that is here to stay, and how we have to carefully navigate our way through it all on a day-to-day basis.” It’s a tense, driving affair with an edge as sharp as obsidian.
The first single released from the album, “Terror Forms,” is present and correct with support from Shannon Hemmett (Leathers, Actors) and a blinding bassline. There are also turbo-charged rhythms in “Muted Obssession” and “Exotic Forms.” Leeb has a part of his brain that generates Vangelis-like ambient material, and there are hints of it in places, but this is mainly a collection of tracks that lead to the alternative dancefloor. If “Infernum” doesn’t get your black leather boots tapping, then nothing will.
The set concludes with “Erosion Through Time,” which takes a gentler, cerebral approach. Leeb has learned a thing or two through a lifetime in music, and there are delicate touches here that are invested with kinetic power. It is proof that you can thrill with kindness.