Sacred Cows

I often find when I'm exploring genres of music that they have "sacred cows"; albums that are discussed in hushed whispers of solemn reverence, albums that nobody would dare criticise, and whose influence and power must go unquestioned. Industrial music certainly has a few of them. Some, like Leather Strip's "Solitary Confinement" or Godflesh's "Streetcleaner', I can definitely understand, and consider them classics. A few though, I am completely baffled by.

Front Line Assembly: Tactical Neural Implant

Ah 1992. Good times. I was still in high school, Paul Keating was Prime Minister, and nobody knew what a carbon trading emission scheme was. FLA put out Tactical Neural Implant, almost universally considered to be their finest work. A quick scan of reviews on music sites will confirm this. But was it really that good? Not at all, say I!
FLA basically had three stages. Their first stage was minimal, angry EBM. The second phase (very brief, only two albums) they went all industrial-rock. Third phase they went to a very polished, futuristic sounding electro / EBM, with some trance influences thrown in. Tactical Neural Implant was their last album before their second phase began, but oddly enough it foreshadows their later phase. That’s because it had lost almost all of the darkness and aggression of their earlier works (especially odd since the album before it, Caustic Grip, is the most aggressive FLA album, and it absolutely rocks). It also unfortunately doesn’t have anywhere near the production quality that FLA demonstrated on their later works like Implode and Epitaph, so you end up with the worst of both worlds. They lost the hard edge of the early albums, but hadn’t yet got the skills and gear to make their new sound work. It’s certainly not a bad album, but both singles (Mindphaser and The Blade) are very ordinary (especially The Blade), and while there isn’t any filler, the album is very short and without any really punchy tracks. I can name half a dozen FLA albums I prefer to this one, yet it seems nobody else on the planet would agree with me.

Skinny Puppy: Too Dark Park

Much like their Canadian brethren FLA, Skinny Puppy have had a long and strange career, lurching from one sound to another, bringing in guitars (The Process), throwing them out (Greater Wrong of the Right), changing lineup, and the other things that bands do. The one constant however is their universally loved opus, Too Dark Park.
What the fuck? This album is much worse than Tactical Neural Implant. It took me about 30 listenings to admit there might be a couple of good tracks on it: Spasmolytic and Nature’s Revenge. And yes, they are very good tracks. But the rest ranges from the average (Convulsion) to the laughably bad (T.F.W.O.). My favourite Skinny Puppy album is Last Rights, and I can certainly understand it might not be everyone’s cup of tea. It is a long, bleak, confronting and disturbing album, full of schizophrenia and melancholy. But Too Dark Park sits well within the same style of albums such as Vivisect and Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse; they’re just much, much better than Too Dark Park. In fact I believe Mind: TPI to be easily their best album after Last Rights. The last track on that album, Deep Down Trauma Hounds, completely shits on ANYTHING you’ll find on this overrated, sloppy mess. So why did Too Dark Park get all the buzz and Mind: TPI get chucked in a corner? Who knows, people are weird.

Nine Inch Nails: Pretty Hate Machine

Some may think that dragging up this weak creature for punishment is just shadow boxing, beating a muppet around the head who has no real capability to defend itself. Surely nobody listens to this tiresome album anymore? Well people do, and many of them still swear by it. How it managed to impress them in the first place, I'll never know. "But I was 19 when I heard this! It was awesome!" they say. I was 19 too when I heard it; my girlfriend at the time had it on high rotation, and I still thought it was crap. Pretty Hate Machine is a collection of juvenile electro-angst, barely meeting any sensible definition of industrial (see my previous blog post for some thoughts on that matter), and hardly possessing any songs worth listening to. Terrible Lie and Sanctified are actually passable efforts, Sin and Ringfinger can be a bit of retro fun if I'm really drunk, but the rest is either disposable trash or, in the case of tracks 1 and 3, unmitigated shit. Head like a Hole has to be one of the worst songs to ever get regular play in a goth club; nothing about the songwriting, lyrics, production or composition possesses any merit. If Def Leppard had put it out as a B-side none of their fans would have blinked, and Nine Inch Nails fans would have poured scorn on its feeble corpse had they ever encountered it. Yet Trent put his name to it, and thus people bop around to its terminally boring chorus every weekend all around the world. Down In It, however, is far worse; a musical travesty I'm surprised anyone was prepared to release. Listening to Trent Reznor try to do some kind of 80s hip hop number, with electronic cowbells, fake vinyl scratching and spoken word gibberish, is certainly something to be experienced, but once only. In case you never have, look upon Trent's works, ye mighty, and despair: Down In Shit
The really scary thing is that I've met people who particularly like not just this crappy album, but that uber-crappy song. Baffling.

"But they were here first!"

One of the strange ideas I see circulated in discussions about music is what I guess you could call the "they were here first" myth (I haven't yet thought of a better name for it, feel free to suggest one). This is the idea that if someone (a musical artist or group) was the first to perform music of a certain genre, then they are automatically accorded supreme elite status, and considered the one and only true performers of that style. This idea I find to be particularly common in the industrial music scene. I also believe it to be completely untrue.

The first people to perform and record what is known as industrial music were Throbbing Gristle. There isn't much debate about this. There is a debate however about the progression of industrial music from there.
You generally find amongst the snobby "industrial purists" or elitists out there an attitude that Throbbing Gristle and their immediate descendants (Einsturzende Neubauten, Coil, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK) are the only actual industrial bands. Everyone else is either a feeble imitator (the various experimental or "noise art" groups since those acts were around), or playing a completely different genre altogether (i.e.any EBM band, any industrial rock / metal band, any dark ambient or death industrial band, any japanoise band, any aggrotech band, any power noise / power electronics band, basically any and every band that is called "industrial" by 99.99% of the people who know anything about those bands). According to the industrial purist (generally a rather vile specimen of human being), all those bands are in fact "post-industrial".

What the hell? Post-industrial? Why not industrial? "Because it's different!" the purist screams. "It doesn't sound like Throbbing Gristle. It doesn't sound anything like it!". Right. So a style can't change? AC / DC doesn't sound anything like Chuck Berry. So should we stop calling AC / DC a rock band and call them "post-rock"? Herbie Hancock doesn't sound much at all like early Dixieland Jazz. So is it "post-jazz"? Of course not.

Industrial purists seem horrified that people who have twisted and distorted the "original spirit" of Throbbing Gristle should inherit their name and mantle. Which is a bit lame, because twisting and distorting things was one of the original and fundamental tenets of industrial music. They also seem to follow this myth I mentioned earlier, that if you're the first person to do something, then that automatically means you did it in the best and most pure way. Throbbing Gristle must have by default captured the essence of industrial music, because they did it first.

I think it's perfectly possible, if not probably, that the first people to do something did not really capture or understand it. They were just scratching the surface, discovering bits and pieces, beginning to clear away the dust and cobwebs that surround the true ideas of the genre. Sometimes it requires other perspectives and ideas from other people, working with the initial discoveries, to really push the boundaries further.

Now am I here claiming that KMFDM or Nitzer Ebb captured the "pure truth" of industrial music? Absolutely not. But if you ask me, I’d say that the most “industrial” sounding album you’re ever likely to find, is Xenonics K-30’s “Automated”. This is an album of noise music released in a rare collaboration by power electronics artist Navicon Torture Technologies, and power noise artist Converter. It is a brutal, bludgeoning, smashing cacophony of steel, madness and destruction, and I love it. It was also released in the year 2002, decades after Gristle were fucking around with tape loops. And the really ironic thing? I’d say 90% of the snobby “industrial purists” out there have never even heard of it.