Welcome to the third Friday in July, or as we call it in The States, the backside of summer vacation month.  Today’s newsletter is heavy in the Industrial Music sense.  Great music, stories, and ideas all presented with that hard driving beat you can thank Trent Reznor and Al Jourgensen for perfecting.  Start your tour of Industrial Friday with coffee makers; you can't dance all night if you don't start the day with a dark roast you can chew!  Next is a good story about using AI to enhance internal recruiting and beat your competition.  After the business is out of the way, we get into Industrial music, as we like to call it, Frankenstein’s Monster of punk, synth, electronic and heavy matched up with lyrics and rage vibes that helped some of us define the 90s.  It's a healthy look back to small club sounds and fences that protected the bands from many kids who needed to get the energy out

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Imagine - dystopia hits and each person is only allowed to pick one drink for the next 50 years, what would you pick?  For the team at WAS, it's coffee, and everything else is a distant second.  Yahoo has a story about coffee makers, courtesy of on one of our Browser home page feeds.  A quick read with several of the most popular coffee brands.  We have used all of them, although the more expensive machines we've had coffee from in a coffee shop, not in a home setting. 

There is a Keurig in our offices, and we have had Nespresso.  Nespresso needed to impress us more to support the subscription service they wanted to send us specialty coffee pods.  The next machine on the list might be the De’Longhi All-In-One, we’ve had coffee from a De’Longhi, and the price point looks reasonable enough for what we consider a Performance Enhancing Drug in the media biz!

In this new, everything is AI world we live in, we are looking for stories that highlight creativity and use AI as a tool to build better things.  In this quick read from The Morning Brew’s HR newsletter, they highlight insurance company Cigna and how they use AI to promote new positions to existing employees.  The new system works, and 65% of Cigna's roles were filled internally.  This is a Win–Win–Win; promoting from within usually streamlines training and reduces new hire administration; it also improves employee morale by promoting growth within the company, and fewer openings can go unfilled in the tight labor market. 

Cigna worked with Phenom, which built an AI-powered talent experience platform.  Cigna is a large company that employs over 70,000 people; one of the benefits of the AI explosion in 2022-23 is you don't have to be a Fortune 500 company to utilize the tech.  You have to get creative about the problems you are trying to solve internally or for your customers.  You win when you can use AI to Enhance your systems or solutions!

Depending on your age, Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails would be the first thing you think of if someone asks you about Industrial Music.  We remember seeing bands like Nine Inch Nails and Ministry behind the chain link fence.  The debate on where it came from rolls on, whether you go back to the synthesized music coming out of the 80s or bands that made a transition like Joy Division, a late 70s punk band who matured into the 80s alt-rock band New Order with Industrial overtones.  If your introduction to Industrial was in the 90s and Ministry was your go-to band, listen to Al Jorgensen's early music; it's pure pop.  The 90s took Industrial, and unleashed it on Emo and dark techno, and influenced everyone from Jesus Jones to U2.

Consequence Sound, who isn't known for album lists (that’s Pitchfork’s gig), put together a thoughtful list of the top 50 Industrial albums for your review.  Our biggest takeaway is how many bands appear on the top 50 albums more than once.  Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, KMFDM, and others have multiple albums on the list.  Filter a band who grew out of Nine Inch Nails is on the list; Stabbing Westward, and Killing Joke, both made the list.  If any bands mentioned above were part of your history, Consequence has a good read on the bands, the music, and the scene.  Oh, and the album art for the Industrial scene is also one-of-a-kind.

Best opening line of a song - …ding-a-ling-lang-a-long...

Click on the Apple Music image to listen to the song on Apple Music or on the Spotify Image to listen to Spotify.

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Thank you for spending a few minutes with us. Here’s one for the road!

With A Shout newsletter is written by Johnny Christian with the support of a thousand idea bits and the help of many people.

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