Skrew - Universal Immolation

When I was sixteen years old, I saw the video clip to "Picasso Trigger" on a video cassette recording of ABC TV's rage music video program. That song zietgeisted hard, three guitars, beefy electronically supported beats, strobing and distorted vocals.

  

I got to hear all of Dusted. several years later (don't laugh, Napster was just getting born) and never really recovered from my disappointment.Over the weekend, I got to hear Universal Immolation. Somewhere along the line (unlike the djentlemen from three years ago), Skrew picked up on the best bits of Meshuggah (hypnotic, tribal, repetition), started programming better beats and soundscapes and actually became good.

 

Universal Immolation won't blow your mind but it is a rather good representation of what industrial metal can and should be in the Twenty-first century.

Skinny Puppy - Weapon

After a string of post Goettel overdose, post-The Process niche but mostly mediocre albums

(The Greater Wrong of the Right, Mythmaker, Handover) Cevin and crew return with what is

arguably the most Skinny Puppy sounding album since Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate. Also it

just happens to be excellent.


Skinny Puppy's complexity always sounded best as a kind of Canadian, white boy, junkie

answer to early Public Enemy. Heavy with samples, noise, dissonance and odd loops, their

best work overwhelmed the listener with stimulation but also soothed with cold, distant

melancholia (VIVIsectVI). But when in the late 90s the band went hi-fi a lot of the charm

of the noise was lost. Everything sounded a bit too simple, normal, pedestrian. Where once

they were pioneers, now thanks to better computers, cheaper synths and greater access to

knowledge everyone has access to the same tools. Chances are there are Skinny Puppy

presets available somewhere for download.


With Weapon, however, Key, Ogre and Walk have intentionally stripped back the timbre

pallet and focused instead on melody and word play. And it simply works. There is sense of

self-reflexivity in the deliberately restrained strength. Skinny Puppy finally sound

relevant again, that is to say, unique and in an uncompromised, unemulated state of their

own. Eighties industrial has never sounded better nor more modern.