Half Machine Lip Moves is the third studio album by American rock band Chrome. It was released on March 15, 1979 by Siren Records.
The album has been reissued several times on different labels: by Beggars Banquet Records in the United Kingdom in 1980, by Expanded Music in Italy in 1981, by Dossier Records in Germany in 1988, by Touch and Go Records in the United States in 1990, and by Cleopatra Records in the US in 2007 and 2012.
The creation of Half Machine Lip Moves was helmed by Chrome members Damon Edge and Helios Creed. AllMusic describes the album's basic elements as "aggressive but cryptic performance and production, jump cuts between and in songs, judicious use of sampling and production craziness, and an overall air of looming science fiction apocalypse and doom."[1] It was described as post-punk by music writer Simon Reynolds.[2]NME journalist Andy Gill wrote that the album departed from earlier Chrome albums by featuring excessive use of "disconcerting sound-collage washes and interjections", as well as frequent "vocal fragmentation", with "very few cases of the one track/one riff syndrome" to be found on the songs.[3] It was cited as the "beginning of industrial rock".[4]
British magazine The Wire included Half Machine Lip Moves on its list of "100 (130) Records That Set the World on Fire (While No One Was Listening)".[7] In 2013, The New York Times wrote that "one of the things that makes the record so good is how intriguing the grooves and pockets and riffs are, how close the music theoretically seems to be getting to something more universally appealing—David Bowie's sound at that moment, for example."[8]
^"Chrome: Half Machine Lip Moves". Record Collector. p. 104. Half Machine Lip Moves remains the sonic masterpiece. Edge threw the kitchen sink into the production...
^"100 Records That Set the World on Fire (While No One Was Listening)". The Wire. No. 175. September 1998.
^Ratliff, Ben (6 Oct 2013). "Chrome". The New York Times. p. AR20.
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