Johnson Engineering Co. - Unleash (1989)

I bought this for a quid because I'd heard of them, and I liked the idea of a band named so as to suggest they had been considered a reliable manufacturer of widgets and trunions since 1946 - drum machines and sequencers were involved so Johnson Engineering Co. seemed like a pleasantly sober change from the usual melodramatic cyberpunk bollocks. I listened to the album, and then it vanished in the general direction of Record and Tape Exchange during some briefly draconian purge of my vinyl collection. It wasn't a bad record. I just hadn't been able to imagine listening to it again.

Inevitably I picked up another copy at some point, because I still really liked the idea of a band called Johnson Engineering Co. and couldn't remember what it had sounded like. It turns out it had sounded a little like Portion Control impersonating Front Line Assembly - ostentatiously digital late eighties production but with a higher than average BPM and lots of shouting, a shitload of cowbell, busy sequencers but with tunes and no suggestion of having ever wanted to be a heavy metal act back when it was growing up. To be fair, Unleash sounds like a lot of other records from the time and as such may be viewed as the EBM equivalent of Status Quo - familiar moods and riffs efficiently executed, and probably not much you won't have heard before; and yet, despite whatever elements may be working against it, Unleash is somehow a fucking great album just as Accident Prone and Down Down were cracking singles.

Back in the day, I recall some suggestion of Johnson Engineering Co. being a kind of Portion Control tribute act, sounding the same, occupying the flat which members of Portion Control once shared, and even with similar haircuts. More recent research has revealed that one of them was actually in Portion Control for a while, so I've no idea where that leaves the mythology, or whether the aforementioned flat actually was above a shop called Johnson Engineering. Well, never mind, because this unassuming, mostly overlooked and now probably forgotten artifact has endured surprisingly well given just how much cowbell is featured; and if it's typical of a certain genre, it's nevertheless lasted significantly better than many who did this sort of thing to greater acclaim. Actually, it pisses over the majority of the miserable fuckers, if truth be known.