Numb - Mortal Geometry

Numb has been one of the quiet architects of the electro-industrial sound since the late eighties, and Mortal Geometry marks the long-awaited return of Don Gordon's project after decades away from new material. Gordon's ear for arrangement and sound design, the same qualities that made Numb a defining name in the genre's formative years, is on full display here, picking up more or less where the band's prior album left off, but with the benefit of production tools and studio techniques that simply didn't exist twenty years earlier.

The record moves through ten tracks that range from pulsing, seething EBM to slower ambient interludes and trance-inflected passages, all held together by Gordon's atmospheric touch. Songs like "Redact," "The Waiting Room," and the title track "Mortal Geometry" showcase the harder, darker side of the record, while "Summer Lawns" and closer "Hush (Creation to Negation)" pull back into more textured, spacious territory. It's a record built on contrast, aggression and restraint trading off across its runtime, and it plays like the work of an artist who never lost his instincts even after years away.

For longtime fans of the genre's early wave, Mortal Geometry is a welcome and legitimate return rather than a nostalgia exercise, arriving on vinyl for anyone who wants Gordon's signature blend of angst and atmosphere on wax.