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Final, "Reading All The Right Signals Wrong"
Issued earlier this year as an LP, the latest Final album is rereleased digitally with almost an entire second album’s worth of alternate mixes that combine the strongest moments of Justin Broadrick’s long-standing side project into a single work. It meshes the dark, moody ambience of his discography with the more recently resurrected love of dirty noise into 80 minutes of melancholy melody and speaker shredding squall.
Final started as a noise band by a teenage Justin Broadrick, and was then revived in the mid 1990s as a dark ambient/isolationist project, and is responsible for some of the short-lived genre's best works. Now, in its third phase, Broadrick has combined elements of both previous forms into a newer, evolved sound.
"Right Signal" begins with dirty crunchy bass noise that sounds pulled off of any possible noise record, but paired with melodic ambient synth that ranges from dramatic prog-rock flourishes to dark, horror movie dirges. Synthetic horn fanfares are presented alongside distorted electronic passages with a slow building tension throughout. "Wrong Signal" is initially pure power electronics swell with guitar feedback and noise winding through. Through its 15 minute duration, mournful synths eventually come into focus, calling to mind some of the melancholy moments of 2 but in a far less minimal context.
"Stop at Red" keeps up the darkness by focusing on sparse, treated guitar over a stripped down bed of electronics, eventually being dominated by squealing feedback and raw noise, though the deep, gliding bass sounds never go away. The track ends with the multi-tracked voice of Broadrick (I am assuming) that could be a lost Jesu vocal track. The original material ends with "Green," mixing mostly plaintive guitar playing from Broadrick with more ambient sounds. The guitar has the dreary post-punk sound that a lot of the more recent Jesu work has incorporated, so it is perhaps the closest sounding thing to that project here.
The alternate mix of "Right Signal" pulls some of the harsh electronic elements away while simultaneously adding more film score elements to give it an even more dramatic sound than prior. The shortened alternate edit of "Wrong Signal" filters the noise down to a hushed static, allowing depressive synths to be the focal point.
"Stop at Red" reappears in a stripped down capacity that maintains the darkness of the original, but keeps the rougher elements more at bay. The remix of "Green" mostly treats and cuts up the original guitar, putting it behind the electronic stuff, and is one of the only cases on here where the alternate version is a bit more raw than the original one. The alternate mixes as a whole are pretty different takes on the material, to the point where one can hear the linkage between the two takes, but either would make a strong stand-alone album. Having them both together is just a great thing.
I have consistently considered Final’s 2 and the Urge/Fail 7" among the best dark electronic music I have ever heard some decade-plus since their first release, and that has not changed. Reading All The Right Signals Wrong, however, is one of the definite high moments in the Final discography that successfully incorporates the harsh, noisier stuff alongside the lush ambient moments that characterized the 1990s incarnation of the project. It takes the classically dark, morose power noise of early Maurizio Bianchi, but with a sense of brooding melody which that genre has never been focused on. It is also perhaps the most multifaceted work he has done under this name, and the alternate mixes exclusive to this CD are varied enough to make a more complete release.
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