Skinny Puppy - Bites

Yippee! It's the first Skinny Puppy LP, Bites. Technically it's their second album because their first EP Remission got an extended rerelease on cassette with additional tracks added and everyone took a vote and decided to grant it a mulligan. Critics weren't particularly kind to Bites in spite of being on board with Skinny Puppy's new Electro-Industrial Rock amalgum. Quick history, Skinny Puppy formed in 1982 before Trent Reznor was even beginning to make Synth-Pop. Bites was released 2 years before NIN officially came into being, so the only real things critics could compare this to are the Joy Division evolution of Cabaret Voltaire, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, and The Human League. I doubt you'd want to be anywhere near the cocktail bar that would let cEVIN or Nivek waitress, but that joke is hilarious. Bites is still technically Dark Synth-Pop, but the samples from The Legend of Hell House and The Tenant are defining characteristics of what would become the Industrial Rock/Metal we all know and love. Spoiler alert, i also have a copy of VIVIsectVI, so we'll get even more Roman Polanski samples in the future (totally awesome as long as i don't have to actually watch the last half hour of any of his films). Think of this as proto Electro-Industrial if you want, but i'm perfectly happy to call in Dark Synth-Pop. I still say Die Krupps invented Industrial Metal, and Skinny Puppy really isn't that in spite of the guitars. This really is the dark and ugly side of EDM that Trent would later become the Foo Fighters of. 

E: no one is going to remember the complicated history you invented to justify that joke, Bottle. 

B: i don't remember asking, Skip. Fine, explain it if you must, i'll wait. 

E: Dave Grohl created Foo Fighters as his Post-Grunge/Cobain Alternative Rock moniker, but over the ensuing decades Foo Fighters itself became, according to Bottle, the winner of the Mainstream Rock Miss Universe Pageant. 

B: i was gonna snark on you out of principle, but that's actually a really good synopsis and i couldn't have said it better. May i continue? I'll take the answer i didn't give you time to formulate as a "yes." 

I think we need to just call this middle phase Industrial Pop, and i'll explain why. Industrial is basically sampled and manipulated Experimental Noise. Industrial Rock/Metal/Dance/Disco are all those genres produced in a specifically Industrial fashion. This middle phase though, it's a totally different cotton swab with earwax on it. Cabaret Voltaire, Skinny Puppy, even the first Modern English album, they're trying to figure out in their own unique ways how to take Industrial Noise and use it as the music part of actual songs. Hence, Industrial Pop. I'm also perfectly happy to mispronounce potato and just call the whole thing Industrial, but i totally realize some people don't like French Vanilla and demand that level of granular sub-differentiation. Electro-Industrial, Dark Synth Pop, whatever keeps your watercraft afloat so long as we all understand it's kind of the inverse approach to The Art of Noise avant-art/sampledelia territory. If Art of Noise = Dalí, then Skinny Puppy = Hieronymus Bosch. One last one before we move on, this is two guys in trenchcoats with Kurzweils, one of whom is screaming, please don't pet my dog type music. 

I lied, one more, as trailblazers of s new musical frontier, they totally deserve a resounding "the pi-ya-ha-ha-ha-hi-ya-nee-eers, in dealing with it they march for dawn....." Ok, i'm done now, let's actually enjoy listening to the dogs bite. 

Look, i realize i'm talking through 40 years of hindsight, but i honestly don't know why Skinny Puppy wasn't being compared/contrasted more to Front242 or Nitzer Ebb, or any of the other socially conscious EDM/EBM groups of the early 80s. Is it just because that stuff was so far underground that American critics really didn't know about it? Nobody from Europe sending promo packs in spite of the albums being on the shelves? Don't lie, it was a Cold War thing, wasn't it? Belgium and Germany get a shoulder shrug, but Canada was just too close to home to pretend like dissention didn't exist with a straight face. 

A proper two sided album, Attack and Decay. My goodness that's a Side A. This doesn't sound proto anything, it's a fully formed horror show. We do go from a very sterile, hostile, mechanical kind of terror to a much more alive but bleeding kind of feeling by the time we get to Film. 

Oh my goodness The Choke is so good. I am of course completely biased because i adore early Thrill Kill Kult, and this is exactly what they were emulating. MLWTTKK eventually found their own niche on the Disco side of the spectrum, but ISGSISBS, and Confessions of a Knife were without question born from Bites, because "bites are infectious." What an absolutely glorious album this is. Side A of Pretty Hate Machine comes admirably close, but this album makes The Downward Spiral sound like over-produced schlock. This is fucking terrifying in a way that neither pure noise nor the addition of Metal guitar riffs can't even begin to emulate. It's not vulgar, but it feels like it should be. It's not even grotesque, or offensive. This is a completely alien world unto itself, and like i said, pants-wettingly terrifying. Like seriously, if i were your trip sitter i absolutely wouldn't let you listen to this album without a signed and notorized waiver in my and my attorney's safe-deposit boxes. I believe this album could and quite probably has actually psychologically traumatized someone. 

Yeah, it's that good.

The Loom