Back in the ’80s heyday of industrial music, when bands such as Nitzer Ebb and KMFDM were putting Chicago’s Waxtrax! label on the map and Al Jourgensen was faking an English accent for Arista records, Front 242 was recording mile markers that would more or less define the sound. Stark, brutal and electronic, its leitmotif was a Nietzschean panorama of struggle and violence at 140 beats per minute.
The crowds around the feet of these industrial gods have thinned more than a little since their seven-inch-singles salad days, but they’ve left behind a core of black-clad fans who take each rivet-gun beat and distorted lyric just as earnestly as if it were 1989 all over again. Touring behind an album consisting almost entirely of old material remixed, Front 242 had no intention of disappointing its constituency Wednesday night at Metro. Though hailing from Brussels, Belgium, as they strutted onto the stage to play the first of two sold-out shows, it seemed Front 242 was coming home.
Dry ice and sunglasses are obligatory at any industrial show, and Front 242 had both onstage before the first note was synthesized. Taking his battle station behind an enormous keyboard, Patrick Codenys leaned into the keys from behind human-fly lenses and giant headphones, his baggy pants and sandals completing the future-mutant costume. Luring the crowd into percolation with an undulating buildup, he and the audience exploded into action when Richard23 danced onto the stage.
Orange hair spiked and sunglasses on, his trademark belligerent rasp hardly fit with his modified b-boy dance moves, silver jacket and fingerless gloves. No combat boots or military paraphernalia here, only low-top sneakers. Was he going to start break-dancing or simply berate us Sprockets-style? As blue and white lights cut through the fog and into the spasmodic audience, Jean Luc De Meyer joined him onstage, demure by comparison with cropped hair and wrap-arounds as dark as his lyrics.
“Stand up, you electronic insect! Stand up, you electronic force!” he sang. Waving his arms and commanding the audience to rise and dance as revolution, he and Richard23 were a force of their own, channeling the impact of the band’s gut-tearing bass and helicopter percussion into a discotheque call to arms.
“What is there to strike for? What is there to stand for? What is there to drive you? What is there to run for?” Despite De Meyer’s insistence in an interview with Technology Works magazine that “we have no message,” his lyrics are rife with sociopolitical imagery and fierce, albeit brief, sagas in which the fittest survive and the meek are trampled.
But the rearranged versions of Front 242’s older songs seemed almost “happy,” harkening to more recent electronic acts like the Orb. In particular, “Im Rhythmus Bleiben” and a redux of the classic “Welcome to Paradise,” with their searing photon sounds, could’ve been duets with Crystal Method. Modernizing its approach to tracks first visited more than a decade before, Front 242 managed to bring their fans, and themselves, into a new era.
