POP REVIEW : Front Line Assembly Pounds Away

Canadian industrial-rock act Front Line Assembly’s records often seem like soundtracks in search of a movie--brutal layers of pounding beats and sheets of electronic sounds that would be perfect for an intense space battle or a moment of acute horror. The Vancouver-based group took care of that problem in its show Thursday at the Palace, with a 4x4 bank of TV screens at center stage.

But that created a whole other problem: The videos--quick-cut meshes of colorful dream/nightmare imagery and clips from the likes of “Videodrome,” “The Wall” and “The Shining”--were far more interesting than the music. In fact, after a five-minute intro in which the video was accompanied by a rolling electronic drone, it was something of a mood-breaker when the band itself came on stage. All singer Bill Leeb’s flailing managed to do was obscure the view, and all the band’s music did was grind and pound.

Virtually every song carried the same heavy 2/2 beat and the same growl effect on Leeb’s voice to the point that the essential sense of menace in both was quickly negated by monotony. Even the video images eventually dragged under that weight.

More than perhaps any other prominent industrial group, FLA is slave to the pound, stuck in the genre’s most elemental formula, which had already been explored effectively Thursday by opening act Contagion, who showed a bit wider range of textures than the headliner. With Front Line there’s little of the sometimes symphonic sweep of Skinny Puppy or the stun-gun force of Ministry, and certainly none of the liberating deconstructive chaos of such pioneering industrial revolutionaries as Einsturzende Neubauten.

Relentlessness has its own intrinsic virtues, but it really should lead somewhere. At the Palace it led only to the conclusion that industrial-rock might be due for another round of deconstruction.