Pendulum is another band I heard first on WBER, 90.5 Rochester "The only station that matters", the song I heard and liked being "Propane Nightmares" from their 2008 album, In Silico. Pendulum is from Perth, Australia, now residing in UK as one of the top drum and bass groups. If you don't know what drum and bass is, just listen and you'll quickly understand, it is pulsing and driven fully by the almost overpowering after listening to the whole album straight through electro enhanced drum beat. More specifically, though, drum and bass became popular in the 90's as an offshoot of the rave scene in England and is called so because of breaks in the music consisting of samplings (little sections cut from other music) of beats and in this case has faster repeated "break beat" sections in terms of beats per minute. Interestingly enough, most sub-genres of house music are determined by how fast your break beats are. But, if you're confused, so am I. One further clarification, however, is that electronic music is very hard to categorize, and should not necessarily be merely called electronica or techno. Electronica is a huge umbrella term that catches tons of different artists from Björk to The Chemical Brothers, while calling it techno is truly a mistake. Techno is a more specific sub-genre of electronica itself, a form of which originated out of Detroit and brought a lot of different subgenres together, such as funk, Chicago house, electro and electric jazz under one roof to create a new style in the late 1980's. So just call Pendulum what it mostly is, drum and bass, and you're all set.
What makes Pendulum different from most electronic music is it's incorporation of dubstep, heavy metal and electro house. The only way to really explain what these different terms are is by allowing you to listen to them yourself, so I've added tracks to the MixPod that incorporate these elements. First, for dubstep and electro house, listen to The Island, Part II (Dusk). I'm not entirely sure which is which upon listening, but I believe the dubstep would be the "overwhelming bass lines and reverberant drum patterns, clipped samples" while the electro house would be the overall underlying beat and dancelike rhythms--at the end especially. Heavy metal influence is much easier to hear, I'm sure, so for that listen to "Comprachicos". Actually, I should really have just put up "Self vs Self" which would fool most people into thinking it is just heavy metal to begin with, if it wasn't for the relentless house beat, but that's too easy to hear the metal influence so I have challenged you to hear the distinction. "Comprachicos" heavy metal influence should really be characterized more as industrial metal, with the distorted vocals and how Rob Swire tries to imitate the sound and lyrical content of Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, a group that helped popularize industrial metal. For more listening, some from Immersion some from In Silico, go to: http://www.myspace.com/pendulum.
As in most electronic music, artists are always brought in to collaborate, see The Crystal Method's latest album Divided By Night. Three such are part of this album: on "Immunize" is Liam Howlett from The Prodigy, a pioneer group in big beat electronic music; on "Self vs Self" is the Group In Flames, a Swedish melodic death metal group; and on "The Fountain" is Steve Wilson of Porcupine Tree and No-Man.
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