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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 4 Seasons - The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette

Image
This might be my longest  album review ever. But i swear a couple times, so it's worth the read ;) How could i possibly mention Jefferson Airplane, The 4 Seasons, and Frank Zappa in the same context? Zappa said "this is rediculous" and a few years later The 4 Seasons said "you know what, Frank is right. This IS ridiculous." To which Jefferson Airplane said, "Oh. Ok. Got it." The real question is: which one is the most transgressive? Zappa said stop fighting, you look like idiots. Jefferson Airplane said i guess if love and community is a bad thing, then sure we're criminals and we'd be happy to move out into the fields and live peaceful lives without your garbage, let us go already. The 4 Seasons said hold my champagne for a moment. In 1969, The 4 Seasons released the single most ironic, acidic, extravagant, and downright befuddling album ever created, The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette. Zappa was accused of writing "shitty doo-w
Read more

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

Pat Benatar - Seven The Hard Way

Image
I don't know about you, but i love Pat Benatar. Yes, that's also her debut album with the single most underrated song in the universe (My Clone Sleeps Alone) in the background, but that's just a generic non-self-titled debut album. We're jumping ahead to her 6th album, Seven The Hard Way, because that, ladies and gentle germs, is how you kalaidescope a concept. Not one, not two, not three, but 4 protien-packed layers to this metaphor. You don't really need to know the overly complicated rules of Craps to know that A) it's gambling, B) "the hard way" refers to rolling doubles, so good luck rolling two 3.5s, and C) you're going to lose, one way or another. It's a joke, but more importantly, it's Pat Benatar and the roll out is Sex As A Weapon, so the innuendo is not intended to be subtle. Wait wait wait, that's only 3, Bottle, where's 4? You're right, last but not least, side B opens with Seven Rooms of Gloom, a Holland-Dozier-Hol
Read more