Skinny Puppy - viviSECTvi

Wowzers, i just looped back around to Skinny Puppy like i was doing it on purpose. If you missed it, we did a review of Nailbomb's Point Blank that was a bit too overtly political and just plain long for facebook, then i tried to just avoid complicated stuff altogether, but we somehow ended up selling our souls to the devil in Animal Town so i guess we gotta talk about vivisection and satan whether we want to or not. It's VIVIsectVI, pronounced "vivisect six" even though it's only their 4th album, and whooee did Nivek Ogre grow up to not like animal research in the slightest. This album is perhaps the first official "looking at the world of humans from an animal's perspective" Skinny Puppy album. If that's too obtuse, think Planet of the Apes, but in the style of Saw or Final Destination or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 

Obviously the title is a portmanteau of vivisection and 666, the latter being a silly coincidental page number, the former being a pejorative term for live animal experiments. 

Putting lipstick on pigs, spraying bleach in a squirrel's eyes, forcing Matthew Broderick to watch a chimpanzee die of acute radiation poisoning, those are all absolutely atrocious things humans don't need to do. But, i can tell you for example if you want to learn about brain trauma, you need to do so in a controlled environment, which means producing brain trauma in a consistent, contolled manner. If you want to see which drugs do or don't pass through the blood brain barrier, then you have to inject drugs into brains. Want to effectively prevent your dog from getting rabies? Kind of have to challenge dogs with rabies to see if your vaccine actually works. 

Yes, there very much was a time when research facilities would get animals from the pound, catch stray cats and dogs, even under the table deals with zoos, but those days are thankfully long gone. Why? Government regulation. When it does its actual job, having a government can be beneficial. When instead it devises ways to undermine the public education system, replace income taxes with higher sales taxes to further cripple the working class, and rhetorically ask questions like "why is my particular flavor of Jesus not dictator?," then government is not beneficial at all. 

I don't want this to turn into just me bashing Ingrid Newkirk again, the point of the album is just to create a reactionary shock that tips you toward considering issues of animal rights/cruelty. You should be against animal cruelty and abuse, but you should also be understanding that animal research is the only real compromise there is between voluntary human reasearch and just simply shrugging our shoulders and saying things like "guess it's blood ghosts, or satan, or something. Covering you in leeches and chopping your leg off might help." 

Humans, as we constantly watch them prove time and again, are capable of confusing moral bankruptcy for righteousness like there's no tomorrow. Looking at you, Republican Party. 

Regardless, what's really confusing is that this is an amazing album that i'm just "meh" on. It's phenomenal, yes, but that doesn't translate into my enjoying listening to it. I enjoy Bites infinitely much more. I enjoy The Greater Wrong Of The Right more that viviSECTvi (as it's stylized here). As far as Skinny Puppy is concerned, i just plain like their Dark Synth Pop better than their TRVE CVLT Electro-Industrial. I'm kinda "meh" on Too Dark Park as well, if we're being honest. Maybe that's just my contrarian nature, but maybe it's because the medium and the message kind of need to wrestle with each other to be truly effective. This particular album by this particular band feels masturbatory and that's not my kink, it just isn't. This, for complete lack of a better word, feels Mainstream to my ears. Again, it's really really good, but i personally really really get all "yeah, yeah, i know, i know, you're not making me feel like i should care." Am i wrong? I certainly could be. Then again, there are only 3 Ministry albums i actually enjoy listening to for exactly the same reason. It's that 'i get it, but maybe on this occasion the hypoerbole is actually working against you" kind of thing, you know? I'm crazy, sure, but i need you to know i'm not actually THAT crazy. 

So there you have it, it might be their best for other people, but it just isn't for me. Sorry?

Interlude