Although released under the name Chaos Face, Doom Ride is a virtually solo Bill Laswell disc, and a relatively ferocious one. The opening track, “Subhuman,” featuring Mick Harris’ screams, surges forward on a pounding beat in a continuous series of speeding ups and slowing downs that create a marvelous tension. Much of the rest of the disc follows suit, if not quite so successfully. Doom Face is far more on the Hallucination Engine end of the Laswell spectrum than on the ambient dreamscapes he was churning out around the same time. Peter Weatherbee’s ambient tapes on the final track (including his steam radiator) give it an intriguing depth of field for a couple of minutes, but that goes largely by boards as the beat machines whirr into life. Less than a decade later, the music already sounds a bit dated, captured in the throes of the isolationist movement that was in vogue at the time, but Laswell injects enough energy and in-your-face pugnacity into the affair to make Doom Ride well worth a listen. – Brian Olewnick
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