Any fans?  Current fans?  Former fans? Prospective fans? Critics?

This thread is about Industrial of all types: Noise, Dance, Gothic, Metal-crossover, etc.

My interest in the genre started with Ministry's "Twitch" album and Cabaret Voltaire's "The Arm of the Lord" in the mid eighties.  At about the same time the early "Dry Lungs" compilations introduced me to more "pure" and "experimental" forms of the genre.  My interet in Industrial waned in the late nineties as I became preoccupied with electroacoustic music, musique concrete, and other forms of experimental music.  I'm still a fan and Industrial music was a lead-in to most music I subsequently came to love.  From Ensturzende Neubauten, possibilities were limitless!

Right now I'm listening to Adrian Hates' project Diary of Dreams, which is certainly in the Industrial family, sounding similar to Skinny Puppy, Clan of Xymox, Front Line Assembly, and Die Form.

Some of my favorite Industrial Records, from all sub-genres, non-ranking, 1985 garnering the greatest number:

Throbbing Gristle: D.o.A. The Third and Final Report (1978)
Coil: Horse Rotorvator (1986)
Cabaret Voltaire: The Arm of the Lord (1985)
Ministry: Twitch (1985)
Clan of Xymox: s/t (1986)
Skinny Puppy:* Cleanse, Fold, and Manipulate (1987)
Fad Gadget: Fireside Favourites (1980)
Einsturzende Neubauten: Halber Mensch (1985)
Die Form: Duality (1997)
Scraping Foetus off the Wheel: Nail (1985)
Front 242: Official Version (1987)
Thomas Leer & Robert Rental: The Bridge (1979)
:Zoviet France:: Shouting at the Ground (1988/1990)
Dead Voices on Air: Piss Frond (1999)
Nurse With Wound: Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979)
Controlled Bleeding: Core (1986)
Nitzer Ebb: That Total Age (1987)
Hafler Trio: All That Rises Must Converge (1994)
Richard H. Kirk: Time High Fiction (1983)
Severed Heads: Since the Accident (1983)
The Revolting Cocks: Big Sexy Land (1985)
Monte Cazzaza: California Babylon (1982)
Boyd Rice: Music, Martinis, and Misanthropy (1990)**
Test Dept:  A Good Night Out (1987)
Diary of Dreams: Moments of Bloom (1994--1999)

*The Legendary Pink Dots are my all time favorite band that can be called a "band," as "The Tear Garden" they collaborated with Skinny Puppy, however, I consider both projects LPD/TG falling just outside of any Industrial genre.

** Boyd Rice/NON has made some interesting music, but he's just too much of asshole to make my list.  Sorry.  I can't stand the guy.  He's a nazi.

In addition, for me, there will be NO:
Nine Inch Nails, Prodigy, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, or KMFDM.
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/10/warrior.gif

  Industrial is one of those genres that I basically enjoy, but don't know why.  Feel me..?

  Its nix on a couple of my faves - MLWtTTK, NiN, Depeche Mode, Ministry (after they changed labels).  Hey, I'm a cherry...

  I did own a few early Consolidated albums which was a constant noize in my first car...

  http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2006-6/1193336/Consolidated_-_Consolidated!.jpg

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_(band)
 

  Oh one more thing - their website...

  Check out the vid, you'll love it...

  http://www.consolidatedmusic.org/home.html

yeah if I'm in the right mood. Ministry, Die Krupps, Ramstein get played.

Not my ball o' wax, though I like Nine Inch Nail's "Closer".

Never got into the noise side of the genre, but for the most part, a huge fan.

An enjoyment of sample-based dance music (your standard early/mid-80s new wave stuff, overlaid with samples like DMC's early megamixes) got me started down the road to the dark side.

Cabaret Voltaire and Skinny Puppy were my gateway drugs to industrial.  I'll nitpick with Max on KMFDM; although they ended up devolving into (deliberate and delightful!) self-parody, they were my other gateway drug.  Their 1986/1987ish What Do You Know, Deutschland is as industrial as anything of its era.  The Unrestrained Use of Excessive Force stands against any comparable noise/experimental track of its day.

If you liked CabVolt's Do Right or Sensoria, you'll like KMFDM's early stuff.  Fer chrissakes, the title track of KMFDM's UAIOE was an industrial cover of Frank Zappa's epic rant against television.

Between that and Front 242 and the harder-edged Front Line Assembly, the rest was history.  If you haven't heard F242's Headhunter (1988) or FLA's Mindphaser (1992), you haven't lived. 

I'll also nitpick with Max on NIN.  In 1989, Pretty Hate Machine (and specifically, Head Like A Hole, which is a personal anthem of mine) was great stuff, but it wasn't particularly outstanding.  In the 20 years hence, Reznor's swung between industrial-pop, to experimental, to what I'll loosely call industrial-rock (as opposed to rock-industrial, if that makes any sense).  The pendulum of "pop" has swung closer to what Reznor's been doing, and Reznor's also done more to demolish RIAA than most pop artists have ever dreamed of. 

(And just in case it's just the beer talking, I queued it up.)  Yes, NIN's 2007 release, "Year Zero" is industrial.  You can dance to it, you can scream to it, and it deliberately makes use of the forms of totalitarianism to make political points through the use of bitter and cynical irony.  And there are lots of harsh grinding square waves feeding the keyboards.  The fact that there's an alternate-reality-game surrounding the album, and that the store-bought CD is printed with heat-sensitive ink that, after an hour in your CD-ROM drive, will provide hints to the game, is just icing on the cake.

But we've heard about all that stuff.

If you like the stuff I've talked about, you're also going to want to find out about some slightly more obscure stuff:

Tackhead, for late-80s/early-90s dub-bass-thumping stuff.  Take Cabaret Voltaire's backbeat, add a guy with a megaphone, a boatload of samples, and have Adrian Sherwood (producer of everything from Depeche Mode to Pop Will Eat Itself) not just producing it, but listed in the band lineup.

Birmingham 6 and Cyber-Tec Project are two places where Front 242's Jean-Luc DeMeyer spent some time in the mid-to-late-90s.  If you like Front 242, you'll like this stuff.  Trust me.

Also, Apoptygma Berzerk (recommended tracks: 1994's Electronic Warfare, and 1995's Non-Stop Violence, for awesome up-tempo danceability and prophetic vision.)

If you prefer your industrial with a more guitar-oriented edge, you'll enjoy Front Line Assembly's mid-to-late-90s stuff, and everything by Cubanate.  FLA's work of this era sings about post-apocalytptic robots and cyborgs (random lyric from Hard Wired: "It's time to wake up!  It's time to recieve!  It's time for emergence!  Transparent species!"), and Cubanate sings about cars (random lyric: "Exultation of the speed!  Turn the radio on -- no more love songs!")  We're not talking Ministry-level thrash (and Jourgenson did some great thrash), but it'll still kick you outa your seat.

*pause*

Well.  Holy crap, that was long-winded, even for me.  If those band names are new to you, google some of that stuff, do what comes naturally, and let me know if you like it.  And tell me about something I haven't heard of, because I want to hear it.

edit: P.S.: I didn't forget Ministry.  I just forgot You Know What You Are, from Land of Rape and Honey, which is some of the greatest background music ever written for first-person-shooters.  No mean feat, since first-person-shooters wouldn't be invented for another few years. 

I like a bit of industrial, here and there. Nine Inch Nails are probably the industrial group that has achieved the most mainstream success, but a lot of industrial purists don't like them, deriding them as being too soft and "whiny."

I think a lot of metal fans feel that Nine Inch Nails are too weak, as well. I find that typical fans of thrash or death metal(stuff like Metallica, Slayer, Sepultura, etc.) feel right at home listening to harder industrial groups like Ministry, but can't stand Nine Inch Nails.

I drop some Industrial-type tracks in my alternative mixshow from time to time.  Front 242, Die Warzau, Nitzer Ebb, Front Line Assembly, some Talla 2XLC stuff (Bigod 20, Umo Detic, MCL), Skinny Puppy, Cabaret Voltaire...

Never got into the noise side of the genre, but for the most part, a huge fan.

An enjoyment of sample-based dance music (your standard early/mid-80s new wave stuff, overlaid with samples like DMC's early megamixes) got me started down the road to the dark side.
The dark side was already there.  From the gekko I had a stygian view of the world.  Stygian (1. a. Dark, gloomy; b. Hellish, infernal; 2. pertaining to the river Styx) is a word I discovered recently which describes my take on just about everything like no other!  There was plenty of that sentiment in Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, but that was music for metalheads and stoners.  I was looking for music I could call mine.  Early Depeche Mode and early Ministry were not industrial, but they were the entry point.  From Depeche Mode I discovered Einsturzende Neubauten.  From Ministry I discovered Adrian Sherwood, which in turn led to Tackhead, Mark Stewart, African Head Charge, and so forth. I heard Cabaret Voltaire's "I Want You" and Front 242's "SFR Nomenklatura" on the radio.  Not to mention Wax Trax!/Play It Again Sam...

Cabaret Voltaire and Skinny Puppy were my gateway drugs to industrial.  I'll nitpick with Max on KMFDM; although they ended up devolving into (deliberate and delightful!) self-parody, they were my other gateway drug.  Their 1986/1987ish What Do You Know, Deutschland is as industrial as anything of its era.  The Unrestrained Use of Excessive Force stands against any comparable noise/experimental track of its day.

If you liked CabVolt's Do Right or Sensoria, you'll like KMFDM's early stuff.  Fer chrissakes, the title track of KMFDM's UAIOE was an industrial cover of Frank Zappa's epic rant against television.

I'm not knocking KMFDM, NIN, or Ministry (post-'Twitch') here (not here anyway).  It's just not my thing, but their sounds did become the best-known sub-genre of Industrial.  I actively hated Heavy Metal and the sweaty, long-haired, sleazeball and titty-tattoo rock music aesthetic when I was a kid; I didn't like it reappearing under the guise of "Industrial."  Artists such as Throbbing Gristle, Foetus, Soft Cell,* and Coil were sleazier than anything going in rock or metal--but they were superb at being such and they didn't attract legions of knuckle draggers.

*Soft Cell is not "Industrial," but Almond/Ball have long-standing affiliations with JG Thriwell, Coil, TG, Psychic TV, and so forth.  See also, Lydia Lunch.


Between that and Front 242 and the harder-edged Front Line Assembly, the rest was history.  If you haven't heard F242's Headhunter (1988) or FLA's Mindphaser (1992), you haven't lived. 
For me, Front 242 peaked with "Official Version."  I do love their subsequent albums up to but NOT including Up-Evil and the idiotic thing they released about five years ago.

I'll also nitpick with Max on NIN.  In 1989, Pretty Hate Machine (and specifically, Head Like A Hole, which is a personal anthem of mine) was great stuff, but it wasn't particularly outstanding.  In the 20 years hence, Reznor's swung between industrial-pop, to experimental, to what I'll loosely call industrial-rock (as opposed to rock-industrial, if that makes any sense).  The pendulum of "pop" has swung closer to what Reznor's been doing, and Reznor's also done more to demolish RIAA than most pop artists have ever dreamed of. 
Front 242 cited "Pretty Hate Machine" as one of their favorite albums of all time.  I saw NIN open for Bowie in '96.  Trent & co.  put on an awesome show, no two ways about it.  What frustrates me about Reznor is he is capable of recording music I enjoy (such as track "A Warm Place") but he doesn't.  I also resented the popular idea of Industrial Music becoming NIN, but that's not really Trent's fault.  BTW, Trent denies the rumor that "Nine Inch Nails" comes from the length of nail the Romans used to crucify Jesus.  He says he was just brainstorming for names, he wrote down Nine Inch Nails," liked the way it looked, and adopted it. 

(And just in case it's just the beer talking, I queued it up.)  Yes, NIN's 2007 release, "Year Zero" is industrial.  You can dance to it, you can scream to it, and it deliberately makes use of the forms of totalitarianism to make political points through the use of bitter and cynical irony.  And there are lots of harsh grinding square waves feeding the keyboards.  The fact that there's an alternate-reality-game surrounding the album, and that the store-bought CD is printed with heat-sensitive ink that, after an hour in your CD-ROM drive, will provide hints to the game, is just icing on the cake.
Oh yeah, my friend Bill made his own custom Year Zero mix.  I remember that. 

I recommend Die Form.  I usually find BDSM/fetish stuff to be tediously vulgar.  My encounters with people from that lifestyle (platonic, mind you, it's not my thing) have revealed individuals who are MORE sexually uptight than average and super-obsessed with rules and etiquette.  It's a generalization, but they're like the porn people who go on about "sexual liberation," but it turns out they're more interested in writing the new rules than liberation. But I digress.  Die Form is a fetish outfit, but they've been around for 30 years, and their music achieves the kind of electro-goth/occult atmosphere the others try for but can't quite reach. 

Coil ceased to exist after the accidental death of John Balance in 2004.  They were my favorite Throbbing Gristle spinoff.  Like Die Form, they knew how to be dark and wicked but musically refined at the same time. 

There are two kinds of music:  Good and bad.  If you're great at what you do, style is secondary. 
Ministry, for instance, had style, but he really wasn't that great, so when his style changed to a thrashier guitar-oriented sound, I couldn't dig it.  That's the difference between Al Jourgensen and JG Thirwell.  Whether Thirwell is using synth sequences or pedal-to-the-metal guitar, he always created interesting music.