The User's Guide to Skinny Puppy, Part IV - Music

Many years ago I walked into an AT&T store to get my first cell phone. Finally, I was joining the 21st century. At the time I was wearing a black Skinny Puppy t-shirt with a white picture of the cover of the single for "Dig It." It's a Durer illustration of a ghost rising from the grave. Can't get more gothic than that.

An attractive woman was near the entrance when I walked in. She looked at me and said, "Nice shirt."

People who are really into the whole gothic thing always show it just a little, even in a professional environment. Sure, she had really black hair, and a black blouse, and the woman was a little on the pale side, but aside from her really dark violet fingernails there wasn't a band insignia or any sort of horror iconography to express it. I somehow still knew she was into the scene from the whole way she was dressed, though.

I thanked her and bought a cell phone from another person working there. As I was going through the process the woman in black walked by and said, "Don't charge him for the setup charge." That was good news, because it was $20 and I really didn't want to pay that much money.

I thanked her again and left, but the point of the story was listening to Skinny Puppy paid off, that day. Since I paid $12 for the t-shirt, I was basically paid $8 to advertise for the band instead of paying $12 for the honor and then another $20 for a cell phone years later.

When we last left off I was kind of making fun of the Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate album. No, the music on that particular LP does not sound anything like the The Beach Boys. I wasn't kidding when I talked about some music just being so totally strange that only very dedicated fans are into it...the mainstream is left behind.

There are songs on the album that do indeed rock. By rock, though, I don't mean screeching guitar solos, badass lyrics and bass lines humming above pounding, inspirational drum beats.What I do mean is that one of the tracks on the album, "First Aid," whomps and stomps with it's own particular physics, depriving you of the easy, enjoyable moments guitars and generic rock conventions can usually give you, but giving you so much more.

Instead, "First Aid" gives you roaring, apocalyptic vocals ("The evolution of...DECAY!") and powerful beats, so many blasts and distorted drum impacts, overlapping each other like a vast machine stomping across and industrial landscape, overwhelming and unstoppable.

The synth in that track is also a favorite of mine. There's so much going on with that song, with so many dark notes and warped chords, that I get something new out of listening to it every time, although I couldn't possibly tell you what the hell the song is about.

"Addiction" is similar to "First Aid." Blasts and bangs and electronic, distorted, warping tones spiking through scary lyrics. Well, that's the show you bought the tickets to see, right?

There's even some strange sound effects and samples going on, distorted, distant voices calling our with some sort of horrible dissonance underneath the beat, like ghosts screaming softly from hyperspace. It's a great song, though, because the beat has a somewhat rapid punch with enough swings and changes here and there to keep you listening.

In contrast, songs like "Shadow Cast" don't give you much to work with. Sure, there are a lot of juicy, bloody sound effects, courtesy of the film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, but this isn't a song that you could hum while you were painting a fence on a nice spring afternoon.

Then there are songs like "The Mourn." What the fuck is going on in this song? It sounds like the last transmission of the AI of a dying space station, plunging to it's doom on Pluto. No, wait, it's not a song. It's just a nightmarish series of sound effects.

"Anger" is another song that either scares you off or makes you hungry for more, depending on how much you love the 'Puppy. At first it sounds cool, that plinking, horrific beat accompanied by powerful, icy notes detonating across a somewhat progressive backbeat, but as the song goes on and on, you are denied the memorable lyrics, anthem chorus or serious development that other songs would give you. If you were expecting a guitar solo, "Anger" will also deny you. Sorry.

There's also a song called "Draining Faces" that is just straight up so much like something out of a horror flick that I never want to listen to it in a dark room alone at 3 a.m. I mean, fuck that. But what's compelling about that track is how it picks up and takes off, over and over again, like some grooving, terrifying biomechanical creation about halfway through, as if rewarding you for the courage of enduring the first half.

I like "Draining Faces" and I love everything else on this album, but I've learned to never try to win potential new 'Puppy converts over with Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate. It just doesn't happen unless the person had seriously whacked musical tastes to begin with, and if they did they probably already are into Skinny Puppy, anyhow.

Here's a song a lot of people will like, though.

The User's Guide to Skinny Puppy, Part III - Music

One day when I was in high school I was listening to Rabies by Skinny Puppy on a cassette tape in my bedroom while I was studying for a history exam. "Rivers" had just finished up and "Choralone" was starting. Time to stop the tape and either unwind or flip it over, you know how it is.

No, you don't. We all don't. Now we just hit buttons and songs come instantly to you, popping up out of some infinite electric void. We just conjure music now, and it's a realm of science fiction for people like me who remember that when you wanted to listen to that favorite record wherever you went, you played it loud, left a tape recorder on and left the room. An hour or so later and you had a tape of whatever you wanted. Now we have cd burners, computers and iPods. The music is ours, to command at will. A golden age.

In fact, tapes were weird because every cassette tape would eventually die on you. The tape would snap or flip over, sometimes while you were listening to it, and suddenly it would sound like you were listening to space aliens. Gotta love analog.

"Choralone" is a really weird song. Don't get me wrong, "Rivers" is it's own particular flavor of weird, but "Choralone" is bizarre.

The song sounds like a hymn to Anton LeVay, homeboy. I mean, it's like a hellish, soulless dirge or a grand, malefic chant to some eon-etched chthonic deity. I don't even know what the hell the song is saying. From what I remember, the first lyric is, "UNFURNISHED," whatever the fuck that means.

Seriously, the voice is this deep, dark, almost devilish rumble, like it's coming from a vampire that's buried in the soil three feet to your left. What is this song even fucking about?

I don't know, because I usually skip over it. Like all of us, we have favorite bands and songs we hate, no matter who made them. For instance, I hate the song "Jangling Jack" by Nick Cave. It's just a dumb song that not only does nothing for me, but it's actually a negative integer that subtracts from my happiness, just like "Choralone."

So I'm in high school listening to this tape and my mother barges in and says, "What are you listening to?" I respond, "Skinny Puppy, it's an industrial band." For those of you who don't remember, growing up with your parents is a lot like growing up in jail, and your mom and dad are wardens, guards, and parole board officers. Any infraction could land you in solitary.

Mom freaks out and takes the cassette tape. The song was just too much like Satan, so she swiped it.

"Can you tell me how to get?

How to get to...

SESAME STREET!!!"

I tried to tell mom I never really liked that song, and that to be honest I was still more of a Ministry man, but the problem is my room couldn't take a thorough inspection by The Man. One, I was hiding like two boxes of condoms in my underwear drawer (it was somehow poetic to store them there) and two, I still had my copy of Too Dark Park. If I couldn't explain my way out of Rabies, I certainly couldn't talk my way out of that album.

Before I go discussing TDP, my point is that some moms think everything is Satan when you are in high school and that some Skinny Puppy songs are inaccessible.

By inaccessible I mean that sometimes, the art is just, well, not going to do it for you. That is different than a song just not being your thing. For example, some people just don't care for Roy Orbison, because they just don't care for classic American rock and roll, and because they have no soul and probably devour the flesh of babies and live near dumpsters. What I mean is, if you don't like Roy Orbison please leave my blog and never  visit this hyperlink again.

An inaccessible song or artist or album is just something that is so totally out there, or maybe even chaotic, or even a little too minimalist like "MONOCHROME" by Kodo. Too Dark Park is crazy, it's almost too much Skinny Puppy for neonates to handle, but you can enjoy it. Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed is just plain fucking inaccessible. 

Friends don't let friends listen to this album. It's kind of like

listening to really loud radio frequencies having an orgy.

Like I talked about in my last post, it's fun to be into music that's weird. The problem is, "Choralone" has that deep, chanting voice that just makes me feel weird listening to it. I kind of have to pay attention, but then the lyrics are very weird so it's pointless to figure them out.

The lyrics of Skinny Puppy add to the intense defamiliarization a normal person might feel when confronted by cutting edge industrial music. It's got a weird bet, I guess I could dance to it, but what is he saying? When you think about your favorite songs, it's kind of a prerequisite that you sort of kind of have to know what the fuck the message is before you go chanting the song as if it's a mantra to joy.

Remission, the album I spoke of earlier, has a lot of cool songs like "Far Too Frail," which certainly sounds like Satanic disco, but it also has songs that are nearly as bizarre as "Choralone," like "Film."

Do you know what's going on in this song? You do? Can you tell me? Because I certainly don't know, and this is one of my favorite songs from my favorite album by my favorite band. Go figure. Maybe that's what happens...you listen to a band for so long that every song they have on that one favorite album they made is perfect, and if people don't like it they just aren't hip.

By the way, just so I can wrap up that whole story about my mother, what finally happened was my father got home, explained to mom that whatever modern industrial music had to offer had nothing on The Rolling Stones, especially "Sympathy for the Devil," my mother's favorite song, so maybe she should lay off my record collection. Fathers can be very cool like that.

The lyrics of Skinny Puppy basically seem to be stream-of-consciousness, although I certainly don't believe the consciousness that is streaming is anything remotely sane. Poetry is somewhat like that. If you read a poem and know what it means, you usually either have college degree in a relevant subject or the poetry is awful.

Since you already heard "Assimilate," I'm sure you quickly realized it was a song about man's decay and descent into some sort of cybernetic, dystopic, hellish future. "Oil remove shred tear radiation everywhere it's the fear so unclear man in motion going nowhere..." ok, we get it, stop driving your car all the time, plant a tree and just recycle, I get it, you don't have to scream it.

Ladies and gentlemen, here it is, Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate.

Up in Canada there are actually Caucasians

who are so white they end up looking

light blue.  

The next time you have a Halloween Party just turn the lights down and turn this up. The atmosphere will spook in no time. That's not to say it's the kind of album that's just too weird, but rather that, this album is just more ambient than industrial. It's a whole lot of beats, samples and sound effects. You just can't dance to this.

There are good songs, but for the most part this is a big collection of some pretty dense, experimental stuff. If you enjoy algebra, this is calculus. If you like Moby Dick, this is Billy Budd. 

Industrial does that, sometimes. A band just comes out with an album, and it's just the soundtrack to a horror flick, and not something you play as the sun is coming up and the road trip has just begun. I mean, songs like "Fly By Night" by Chilliwack or "Freebird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd is fun, sun and good times. Driving just a little too fast on the freeway while blasting something with guitar solos is an American tradition. 

Yeah, baby, program the cruise control and crank this up...

The User's Guide to Skinny Puppy, Part II - Music

We all get a visceral thrill of mentioning a band to another music enthusiast that is so damn cool the other person has never heard of them before. Back in the day when I truly believe that how cool you were was determined by your LP collection, if someone told me they liked the Dead Kennedy's, Depeche Mode and The Cure, I'd hit 'em right back with how much I was into Black Market Baby, Television and Pigface. 

Such are the singular battles that comprise that time in our young teens and twenties known as, "The Cool Wars," where we just absolutely need to be more hip than the other person. 

Or maybe you have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'm sure we can also both relate to how cool it feels to get a person into a really badass band. If someone is into Ice Cube, but they've never heard of Westside Connection, well now it's absolutely time to bring that homeboy up to speed on life.

When I was growing up one of my best friends got me into Skinny Puppy by giving me a copy of Remission. I mean, he gave me a cassette tape. This was a million years ago, before CD's got popular, so I am old skool industrial.

At the time I was pretty much into punk, ska, and whatever rap sounded the most violent, starting with Easy E and certainly not ending with N.W.A. and Cypress Hill. It's a freakin' miracle I even sat down to listen to something that was as purely industrial as this album.

We just started playing around with Rabies, and I don't want to move on just yet, but "Smothered Hope" is the first song on the LP, and every time I listen to it, I remember the first time I listened to one of my favorite bands.

This was back when there wasn't much beyond gothic, industrial and early electronica (I'm talking about groups like The Pet Shop Boys) so listening to something I guess I could describe as primitive darkwave was dark and evil fun. 

Late at night, near 2:30 am, when the party was winding down, everyone was passed out and it was just a bunch of guys and girls with spikey hair and leather jackets crashing by a stereo, I'd slap in Remission and check for the reactions of the crowd. I have to admit, to them it probably sounded like satanic disco.

The lead singer of Skinny Puppy, Nivek Ogre, puts his vocals on just about every track, and in concert he really does look like he's very disturbed as he lays down the lyrics. I heard a guy interviewing Nivek Ogre on the radio once that it sounded like Ogre's vocals are put through a "satanizer" during recordings, and you have to agree. Twisted, distorted vocals gives the music the final scary element their music benefits from.

That's not to say Ogre's vocals are always synthesized for terror. On "Candle," the third song from The Process, he sings without electronics twisting the sound to an acoustic guitar. Even for Skinny Puppy that was kind of odd.

Before I go describing the more obscure albums that Skinny Puppy has made, particularly Remission, Too Dark Park and Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate, I want to show you another song you might like. While "Rodent" was kind of a slow burn kind of song, this one is the type of track that populates a dance floor.

The first version is cool, but the remix that can be found on Skinny Puppy's Bites and Remission album (a two-in-one combo featuring a few extra remixes, and certainly worth owning a hundred times over if you like industrial) and it everything you want industrial music to be. It's also the kind of song you play for people you like to get them into a band you appreciate, so here it is.

The User's Guide to Skinny Puppy, Part I - Music

When industrial music rose up in the 90's, nearly every kid on the block had a copy of Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails. The videos were always on MTV, right next to the ones by Nirvana, and there was this feeling that, somewhere in the airwaves, the cool music, our music (punk, new wave, industrial, ska) was fighting a war against the lame music (hair metal, really bad pop rock, just about everything on VH1) and our side was winning.

Sure, you could be cool by owning a copy of anything by NIN, but the real badasses had a copy of The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste by Ministry. 

If NIN was Poison, Ministry was The Blue Oyster Cult. Sure, Ministry started off sounding a little like pop with their first few albums, including Twitch, but their music matured, became infused with some serious guitar licks, and turned into something so terrifying that if you played either The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste or their other album, The Land of Rape and Honey for your parents, they'd scream and burn you and your entire record collection at the stake.

It didn't help that the lead singer and producer, Alien Jourgensen, looked like he'd kick Satan's ass in a fist fight, and then ride his Harley into the sun, firing his M-16 up in the air with a cry of dark victory.

"Do all of you have your Bibles out? Alright, 

let's turn to Matthew 1:18. Now, how is 
the Holy Spirit similar to a V-twin?"

Like the two grumpy old men who sardonically mocked everything lame on The Muppet Show, my friends and I enjoyed watching all of the kids who had kicked our asses a few years ago for wearing a Cure shirt suddenly go around blasting "Head Like a Hole" as if they had a right to. The nerve of those mainstream plebeians, why weren't we consulted?

"They didn't know Psychic TV did a cover of 
'Good Vibrations' by The Beach Boys. 
Ha ha ha! That's funny!"

Beyond Kraftwork and Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle was Skinny Puppy, and band so out there to even look upon their logos was to be met with confusion. A teacher once asked me if I was advertising for a veterinary clinic, or maybe even a fast food chain for canines who were watching their weight.

One student took a look at a Skinny Puppy t-shirt I had with the same design and logo from the band's Remission album and told me they were offended because a friend of theirs died of cancer. I told them that my grandmother passed away with a sweet smile on her beautiful face wearing a Remission t-shirt listening to Spahn Dirge at full volume, so they could fuck themselves off. 

To be fair, the lead singer of Skinny Puppy 

really does stand out in a crowd.

Skinny Puppy is a band for people who want to listen to the beating, bleeding heart of industrial music with the carapace wide open and the mechanical guts exposed. There are many albums to talk about when you are dealing with this band, so I'm going to start you out with a track from Rabies.

Rabies, 1989.

This is the fifth studio album by Skinny Puppy, and it was produced by Alien Jourgensen, himself. You can tell, because the guitars are blasting all over the place with this album, in contrast to previous LP's like Spasmolytic or Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate, which tended to weave the guitar hooks into the music instead of pounding the instrument onto the tracks like a merciless jackhammer.

Here's "Rodent." It's vintage 'Puppy, somewhat scary, very mechanical, and certainly worth dancing to. If you like guitars, they are here for you, but don't expect "Burning Inside." Instead you are going to enjoy a song that combines beats, samples, synth and aggression to make music you haven't heard before.