I was exactly correct: Industrial metal, with all the influences I predicted. But there's so much depth and variety even within subgenres that it still threw some curve balls at me.
Let's get a couple weaknesses out of the way first. First, the lyrics that I can make out are nothing special; generic anti-authority, I-am-persecuted, world-of-crap stuff. In E-B2 I caught “feel like a dirty whore” and something about suffering--nothing you couldn't hear from a million other people and it didn't sound any more profound from them. Second, singer Donnie Breska's clean vocals are nothing special. They're a little nasal and he sort of sounds like Layne Staley, except not remotely as distinctive.
However, while Breska's voice is meh, he's still got a lot of skills as a vocalist. He ably switches between singing, screaming, and rapping--the latter caught me by surprise when he started doing it in Reward, it was like e-bomb crossbred Stabbing Westward with 311--and he knows when to use each. This is a strength shared by the entire band; e-bomb are absolutely brilliant arrangers. The songs are short but they'd never get dull even if they doubled in length because e-bomb pack them with change-ups and interesting features without making them seem overstuffed. E-B2 is particularly masterful; a slow heavy bass intro gets paired with a double time rhythm guitar part, then vocals that match the bass tempo, then everyone comes together on the chorus and apart again for the next verse. That kind of arranging touch is everywhere on the EP without calling attention to itself: dig the split second in Bate when everyone but the bass drops out.
I haven't mentioned the quality or placement of guitar solos because there are none, which brings me to an interesting point. This EP came out in 2001, when rap metal and nu metal were ascendant (arguably rap metal's a subset of nu metal, but anyway), but it's not rap metal as we think of it despite presence of rapping, and there's really no trace of nu metal to it either. It's really defined by a trend from a little before their time, industrial metal, and one a few years in the future: groove metal.
That's what we've got here. Five guys in Phoenix who self-released an EP were on the cutting edge of an emergent trend. Two guitars, but they're used for different chords in the same rhythm, syncopation, or for one to squeeze off the occasional pinch harmonic for punctuation while the other keeps the chords going, which is the closest they ever get to a lead/rhythm split. They're not totally removed their times--Sexafusion reminds me a bit of Drowning Pool's Let The Bodies Hit The Floor--but they're way more Lamb of God than Static-X. Very glad I picked this up, it's good stuff!
Oh yeah, I should see what's on the web. Well, e-bomb aren't in Discogs, and as always the website is pixels scattered in the wind. The Internet Archive's got it, and it is a certified antique. e-bomb's music was a little ahead of its time, not so their website. There's not much there and the images are busted, so there's really nothing to see. Elsewhere on the interwebs there's a myspace page, also busted, and. . .and nothing else that I can find.
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