I’ve been listening to these two albums recently and I"m far more impressed with Twitch from a production standpoint with its quirky song structure, unique sounds, percussion, and consistency. Twitch feels like a journey from start to finish and very smoothly shifts gears.
LORAH’s electronic tracks are pretty straightforward often feature the same beat and synth line for the entirety of the song. And the shift from butt rock to industrial instrumentals in the middle of the album never sat right with me. I found that odd
It’s a close call, but I’m going with LORAH. It’s an excellent demonstration that heavy music can be made with synths and drum machines. It’s still mind-blowing the Stigmata was done without any real guitars. An absolute game changer for electronic music
I found the production on is great. Sherwood is a legend and I think the brilliance falls largely on his shoulders. LORAH is less impressive from a production standard but the way it blended metal guitars and industrial music was a revolution which definitely completely transformed the genre. It’s easy to see how it happened in retrospect, but innovation like that is not easy at all in the moment and I think here what’s brilliant is pretty much all Al and Paul rather than an outside producer.
Yea I think most people would recognize that LORAH was the blueprint for what was to come in the 90’s. But even blueprints can be rough around the edges. They completely mastered the industrial metal gimmick in time for their next album which came out a year later.
I’m always going to choose Twitch as it still sounds amazing to this day, and there really is still nothing like it out there. And it’s my absolute favorite. Just listen to the way the stereo sound pans around the speakers, and it’s just mind-blowing. It’s absolutely full of incredible roaring noise, too, which was generally something you only heard from true industrial noise bands along the lines of Whitehouse, Merzbow, etc., only this had a beat to it. I’d love to have had one or two more albums like this.
But I agree that LORAH was more functionally revolutionary in the sense that it took electronic music in a direction that it had never really gone before, namely a more speed metal direction. Many, many bands followed…and unfortunately in some ways, Ministry also followed but never left that trail again.