A View From The Back Of The Room: Front Line Assembly (Dean Palmer)

Front Line Assembly, Tension Control & Dead Lights, Bristol Fleece, 21.04.25

There’s probably a reason MoM don’t use me all that often for live reviews: I am particularly rubbish at submitting them in a timely manner and this one is no exception as Mr Boss Man has had to threaten me with his night-stick to get this back to him.

Cast your minds back, dear readers, to a simpler time. A time known only as “April” when I am sure life was better and we yearn nostalgically for. In your head are you there? Is everything black and white? Are carts being drawn by horses? They are? Excellent – let’s go.

The Fleece opened its doors on the second-worst day of the week for a gig, a Monday, as Industrial titans Front Line Assembly made their way to Bristol for their first gig in the city since…. **checks previous gig records**….. 2007 (which I was also at, and was one of the few gigs I have ever attended at the O2 Academy which wasn’t painfully oversold and sounded like it was being played through a shoebox), so this one has been a long time coming.

Was it worth the wait? Well we have some support bands to get through first so be patient.

First up was Dead Lights (8), a two piece disco-EBM group formed during the Covid-19 Pandemic as an international project between a UK and Dutch producer duo. I’ve never been much of a fan of EBM as a genre, with a few exceptions of which I am glad to say Dead Lights are one. Plenty of performance from Saul who fronts the band with a pounding live drummer (Richard) keeping the beat and setting off the necessary loops. Very much good fun and strongly recommended for anybody with ears and feet.

Secondly on the agenda was Tension Control (6), a german EBM band who are billed as leaning very heavily into an industrial sound. Honestly they played well and performance was okay, but being honest I found their sound to be far too insipid and lacking in the real “stomp” needed to make me agree that the industrial moniker should sit. I suspect they’d be great fun at about 4am on a Saturday morning at max volume with a sweaty dancefloor somewhere in Potsdam, but this was 8.30pm on a Monday in Bristol so….

Finally we got the headliner as Front Line Assembly (9) found their way onto the Fleece stage, met with applause from a joyously happy crowd (no, really, Goths are happy these days, it’s a great thing) and the evening’s entertainment was complete. They had promised an eclectic set including some deep dives from their significant back catalogue (17 studio albums dating back to 1987) and they absolutely delivered on this. 

Indeed the most recent track they played was “Shifting Through the Lens” from 2010’s Improvised Electronic Device, with the remainder almost exclusively from their 1990s output, something which was very well received from the crowd who, whilst having started quite demurely, soon began getting their best two-step on as tracks like Killing Grounds, Plasticity and Final Impact were played with a pretty fierce precision with just the right amount of smiles on faces that the band still get to do this to a decent audience after all these years. 

Deadened finished the main set to rapturous applause and it was made blatantly clear that FLA’s job was not done as the audience needed one final track to finish the night and, I am pleased to say, they delivered by dusting off 1992’s Mindphaser as a very needed encore before releasing us all into the April evening.

Whilst my review may not have been worth the wait, Front Line Assembly’s return was. Old dogs may not have new tricks, but their old tricks remain pretty darned great.