Puissance - 1996 - Let Us Lead

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.42

Coming immediately after the scorched ritual environment of MZ. 412’s Burning the Temple of God, Let Us Lead feels like the arrival of a new authority prepared to govern whatever survives. The fire has not gone out, but it has been organized. Where MZ. 412 surrounded the listener with smoke, subterranean percussion, and ceremonial confusion, Puissance place the destruction beneath a monumental façade of synthetic brass, orchestral keyboards, military rhythms, and spoken commands. The title is phrased as an invitation, but nothing in the music suggests that refusal remains available. Puissance do not ask for trust so much as stage the aesthetics through which domination begins to resemble destiny.

“Burn the Earth” establishes that scale immediately. Its synthesizers do not attempt to imitate a living orchestra with complete realism. They function more like enormous architectural surfaces: brass-colored walls, string-shaped clouds, and processional drums occupying a landscape from which ordinary human proportion has been removed. The digital textures reveal their period, yet that slight artificiality strengthens the album. These are not musicians pretending to sit inside a nineteenth-century concert hall. They are constructing an imagined state ceremony using electronic machinery, reducing centuries of imperial grandeur into repeatable signals. Melody rises above the rhythm with solemn assurance while the percussion continues underneath like an administrative system that cannot be interrupted. The result is majestic, but the majesty has been emptied of reassurance.

“Control” condenses the album’s argument into one of its shortest and most direct pieces. The voice speaks of mastery, ownership, intimidation, manipulation, and conquest with the flat certainty of doctrine. Behind it, the arrangement turns command into rhythm. Puissance understand that propaganda does not survive through language alone; it needs cadence, repetition, symbols, uniforms, and emotional weather. The music supplies all of them. Yet the track is more disturbing than a simple endorsement of authoritarian power because its presentation is so consciously theatrical. The listener is placed close enough to feel the attraction of certainty while remaining aware of the brutality concealed inside it. This tension runs throughout Let Us Lead. The album displays power as spectacle, but it also lets that spectacle reveal its spiritual emptiness.

“To Reap the Bitter Crops of Hate” expands the sound into a long, severe panorama. The orchestration moves with the pacing of a historical epic, although the history taking place is less a particular war than humanity’s repeated conversion of grievance into destiny. Puissance build through accumulating layers rather than instrumental virtuosity. A martial pulse, a mournful progression, a synthetic choir, and a rising fanfare may each be simple alone, but their placement creates the sensation of forces gathering beyond the listener’s field of vision. The duo’s compositions work through mass. Sounds arrive not as individuals but as formations. Even the melodies often feel less like personal expressions than national hymns belonging to countries that never existed.

“Behold the Valiant Misanthropist” brings the human voice back as an embodiment of total rejection. Its declaration of war against life is so absolute that it ceases to resemble ordinary anger. It becomes a philosophical costume, the fantasy of a speaker who believes that perceiving hypocrisy has granted him the right to annihilate everything. Puissance neither soften nor psychologize the position. Instead, they give it an elevated setting, allowing grand orchestration to enlarge a private hatred until it claims global dimensions. This is where the album’s beauty becomes ethically uncomfortable. The music can make negation sound heroic. That does not mean the listener must accept its worldview, but it does expose how readily grandeur can lend emotional legitimacy to monstrous ideas. Let Us Lead is valuable partly because it refuses to resolve that discomfort on our behalf.

“Dance in the Sulphur Garden” offers one of the album’s more fluid and melodic passages. The title suggests movement within an already poisoned environment, and the music carries an almost graceful momentum without becoming warm. The keyboards spiral and advance while the percussion maintains an inflexible frame. It is a dance permitted by the regime rather than an escape from it. “March of the Puissant” then removes much of that ambiguity, presenting the duo’s martial language in concentrated form. Its force comes not from speed or physical heaviness but from posture. The rhythms stand upright. The melodic figures behave like banners. Every repetition seems designed to make the musical formation appear larger than it actually is.

That capacity to manufacture scale is one of the album’s central achievements. Puissance were working with electronics whose orchestral simulation can now sound unmistakably tied to the mid-1990s, but they rarely allow technical limitations to shrink the imagined world. The somewhat rigid brass and strings become the proper materials for a music concerned with systems that subordinate flesh. A more naturalistic orchestra might introduce too much breath, friction, and individual personality. These programmed sounds are disciplined into geometric shapes. Their lack of human looseness is not merely a production flaw; it is part of the album’s political atmosphere. Even where the arrangements become beautiful, they remain incapable of tenderness.

“Global Deathrape” pushes the record toward its most openly apocalyptic territory. The provocative title is intentionally ugly, collapsing military conquest and sexual violation into an image of planetary assault. Musically, however, the track is not chaotic. Its destruction remains measured and orchestrated, implying that catastrophe may arrive not as the collapse of organization but as organization perfected toward murderous ends. This is a recurring nightmare within Puissance’s work: civilization does not accidentally fail and produce horror. Its technologies, hierarchies, and collective myths function exactly as designed, eventually acquiring the capacity to erase the people who built them.

“Whirlpool of Flames” closes the original album by bringing the rhetoric of global destruction toward the memory of a bombed city. Images of shadows burned into walls, injured children, and generations marked by the blast replace the earlier pleasure of abstract command with bodily consequence. The piece remains grand, but its scale now resembles mourning more than conquest. This change does not redeem everything that preceded it, and the album is stronger for refusing an easy moral reversal. Instead, the final track leaves triumph and atrocity occupying the same musical territory. Victory becomes indistinguishable from mass death when viewed from inside the flames.

Let Us Lead is less refined than some of Puissance’s later work, and its emotional vocabulary is deliberately narrow: command, hatred, procession, devastation, and grief recur with very little ordinary human life between them. Yet this concentration gives the record its identity. It does not merely provide martial rhythms decorated with orchestral samples. It examines the machinery by which power becomes beautiful, beauty becomes persuasive, and persuasion becomes permission. Its repeated emblems, burning globe, crossed weapons, and regimented visual design complete that closed system. The album offers leadership as a magnificent poisoned chalice, then allows the listener to experience both the magnificence and the poison.