Bill Leeb was an early member of Skinny Puppy; after leaving that group in 1986, he started Front Line Assembly with help from Rhys Fulber and later Michael Balch. Recorded in 1992, Tactical Neural Implant is FLA’s sixth full-length and a Leeb/Fulber duo effort. The music is substantially more melodic and conventionally structured than their earlier work, landing somewhere in between Skinny Puppy’s dark electro atmospheres and Nine Inch Nails’ early, post-Depeche Mode anthems. Huge beats sampled from James Brown and Led Zeppelin propel pulsing industrial tracks densely layered with burbling synths, crunching guitars, snippets of movie dialogue and Leeb’s harshly declaimed lyrics. They’ve got a way with a chorus, and their melodies have the pumping dancefloor energy of techno — this is a highly populist take on industrial, and it was their most successful release for a reason.