Stranger Than Fiction

Tackhead drummer Keith Leblanc’s second solo album, released in 1989, is a denser and more complex slab of industrial cyberfunk than his debut, 1986’s Major Malfunction. The vocal samples — which include William S. Burroughs, Albert Einstein, Leonard Nimoy, and Lenny Bruce — fly thick and fast over grooves that mix dub, metal, and jagged electronic noise. The paranoia about technology evident in the first album has darkened into apocalyptic millenarianism; there are still samples of dialogue dealing with airplane crashes and the like, but there’s also a narrator describing “the ozone layer, looking like a burned-out sponge,” and “Dream World” samples dialogue from Blade Runner about fleeing the planet entirely. The final track, “Comedy of Errors,” which was removed from certain editions after copyright challenges, features Lenny Bruce talking about stereo obsessives and his legal travails over a jazzy hip-hop beat. It sounds more like Coldcut than Tackhead.