Thought Industry

T

he founders of Thought Industry were Brent Oberlin(vocals/bass), Chris Lee(guitar), Paul Enzio (guitar) and Dustin Donaldson(drums) in the early 1990s. Signing to 'Metal Blade' they would release an album featuring a wide variety of extreme musical styles including basic Metal, Hardcore, Industrial, etc. The only constant theme throughout Songs for Insects (1992) was the nihilistic vocal content. Mods Crave The Pig appeared the following year. It took several years but the act finally issued a long awaited follow-up Outer Space is Just a Martini Away early in 1996, under a slight line-up change of Herb Ledbetter on bass and Jared Bryant on drums, while their best effort to date, Black Umbrella, was unveiled eighteen months later. Black Umbrella bore little resemblance to any of their previous work with the focus more on simpler songwriting and an Alternative rock influence, but less pop oriented than that term would normally imply.

After the 1998 release of Recruited to Do Good Deeds for the Devil retrospective (a disc featuring a varied list of tracks of live, unreleased and alternate-version semi-compilation), 2001 saw Oberlin recruiting a whole new line-up with Mike Roche (guitar/bass), Jeff Borkowski (guitar/keyboards) and Cam Taylor (drums) to release Short Wave on a Cold Day, which continued their migration away from heavier music but remaining experimental and quirky (judging from the song titles, they hadn't lost anything on the lyrical content). All the same, as good as the old material was, the band stayed active and continued to record on their own terms.