Neologic Spasm (8.5/10): the album begins brutally, with a song that sums up all the album. Samples everywhere, complexity, amazing electronics, heavy basslines, the guitar more submerged in the sound than in 'Millenium'. To me sounds as a renewed version of TNI's 'Final Impact'. The chorus is similar.

Paralyzed (8.5/10): Another electronic attack, with extremely distorted voice, good chorus, more obvious guitars at the 2nd part of the song.

Rebirth (8/10): no time to breathe. After a good intro, another agressive song begins, now with more guitars, catchier chorus, it's good but stmes bores me.

Circuitry (8.5/10): the single displays one of the best songs I've ever heard. In fact, I think FLA is one of the bands that has better chorus in the history of music in general. Circuitry is more a rock song, heavily electronic but with heavy guitars; but we find the difference with 'Millenium': here the guitar is just an instrument more, not so in control of the song.

Mortal (8/10): instrumental song: 1st part full of samples, no beat. 2nd part, the beat begins to conform another good instrumental FLA song.

Modus Operandi (8.5/10): strange song. Extremely disquieting voice, Leeb sounds as if he was drowning in water or something, guitarristic chorus, not as danceable as other songs, a change in the album.

Transparent Species (8/10): good electronic intro, it sounds like a quieter twin of 'Neologic Spasm'; it kind of tires me after 2 minutes, I can't help it.

Barcode (9/10): a long techno intro which anticipates a bit the 'Flavour of the weak' style, introduces a very good song, with some guitars, good voice, good chorus, agressive but not too much, excellent.

Condemned (7.5/10): it's a good song, but not my favourite. It's the only song here where the guitars control the song, 'Millenium'-style, catchy structure.

Infra Red Combat (10/10): deserves special attention. A masterpiece of elecronic music. One of the best FLA's songs. The song is divided into 2 parts; the 1st, a 4-minute intro which reminds me a bit of Delerium but more upbeat, industrial electronic landscapes. The 2nd, with very good vocals, a sort of Leeb duet with himslef but interpreting 2 voices, extremely good chorus, more melancholic than the rest of the album, more natural voice.

To sum up, Hard Wired is a very good album, one of the best examples of what can be achieved with electronics in music, but it suffers a slight problem of monotony: the 4 first songs, for example, sound too similar, the mood is always the same. I think it was obvious it was the end of a stage, a very good stage of collaboration between Leeb and Fulber.


Takes on almost an organic-like form   May 25, 2005
 3 out of 3 found this review helpful

I actually give this 4.5 stars.
Infra Red Combat is right up there with my favorite `industrial' songs of all time. I love music that builds and builds into a mound of emotion and sound, and this song does just that. The whole album almost takes on an organic-like form. Every piece twists and grows through amazingly talented instrumentation, vocals and lyrics. I'm not even going to attempt to analyze every track or do a long drawn out comparison from previous albums, because I'm just not good at doing that. I will, however, tell you this is (in my opinion) Front Line Assembly's finest piece of work. I have listened to this album countless times from start to finish and it never fails to amaze me.