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June 15, 2006

Burnt With Water

We're getting ready for the big move. Pretty much everything I own is in boxes. So I'm still fighting off the depression and the second-guessing.

Out of left field, then, here's a confession: I'm a closet fan of industrial dance / EBM ('electronic body music'--I know, silly name) bands. I've been listening to this stuff again lately. In the late 80s, I was listening to this sort of music A LOT. While the recent crop of "industrial" or EBM-styled bands aren't on my radar anymore, a lot of the earlier examples of the music has stood the test of time, and sounds equally exciting and hard and contemporary today. So here I've made a list of my favorites from that period. In keeping with my obsessive idiosyncratic guidelines for silly list-making, I limited myself to one record per band. I stopped the list around 1990 (so I didn't include later stuff like Godflesh, Scorn or other Mick Harris projects, or The Downward Spiral, all of which could have snuggled somewhere into this list). It begins with one of the bands that started it all:

(1) Cabaret Voltaire, The Arm of the Lord. Still sounds utterly fantastic. And the synth sounds are like no one else's. I remember when the "cooler" gay clubs used to play "I Want You" on their once-a-week-requisite "alternative night"... oh, those were the days. Sort of. And oh yeah, "Sensoria" is to this day one of the greatest videos ever.

(2) Skinny Puppy, Vivisect VI. SP is one of the few bands that I think still sound complex and exciting after all these years, and this is my favorite out of all their terrific, harsh, often-mimicked records. "VX Gas Attack"'s lyrics are so eerily prophetic now, given recent history. I saw them live when they toured for this record in St. Louis, MO; they spattered fake blood and burning dollar bills on the audience and played played played the film loop of R. Budd Dwyer blowing his brains out on TV. All of this fit the music strangely perfectly; the black-clothed audience was elated.

(3) Coil, Love's Secret Domain. I just listened to this again today, and Wow. This one's essential. I love Coil's more ambient and more grating electronic records, too, especially Horse Rotorvator and the later Black Light District. But "Domain" is just perfect. There are three total masterpieces on it: "The Snow"; "Further Back and Faster"; and "Dark River," the latter of which I swear I'm going to use as the opening credit theme to the horror film I want to someday direct. R.I.P. Jhonn Balance.

(4) Clock DVA, Man-Amplified. Great creepy synth parts and intricate, repetitive bass lines. I always loved the subversive, mega-intelligent liner notes that Adi Newton would write for their records. Not long after I first moved to NYC in 1991/1992, Clock DVA were slated to play at the Limelight, and I excitedly went, only to be devastated when their visuals weren't working or some other glitch. The band was visibly pissed, and they wound up playing a handful of tracks before disgustedly stopping. It was exciting nonetheless. And although it isn't on this particular album, here's a seizure-inducing video for "The Hacker."

(5) Chris and Cosey, Techno Primitiv. I love everything this band has ever done. Techno Primitiv is perhaps not as heavy and beat-driven as the other things on this list--Chris and Cosey would get a little closer to that style in later years--but this is my favorite of their many records. It's so haunting and cool and sexy and eerie. Cosey's voice is like a ghost's in some faraway haunted house. "Misunderstandings" is my favorite song of theirs, and it's on this record.

(6) Meat Beat Manifesto, 99%. One of the bands originally on the stupendous, short-lived Sheffield-centered UK record label SWEATBOX (along with equally great bands like In the Nursery and A Primary Industry). Much of their music was sort of the bridge between 'industrial' and hip-hop. And Jack Dangers was, and still is, really cool. There was a brief time in Kansas City when many of these Wax Trax! bands came to play live concerts at a little Westport-area club called THE SHADOW, and my sister, my black-clad friend Lori, and I would head there to see them. We also saw live bands like Pankow, MC 900 Ft. Jesus, a: grumh, Consolidated, Moev, Die Warzau, and others, but Meat Beat Manifesto was one of the best. "Psych-Out"... "Hello Teenage America"... "Helter Skelter"... all amazing songs.

(7) Revolting Cocks, Big Sexyland. I think this is the best thing Al Jourgensen ever did. Once again, a huge hit for the goth kids on 'alternative night.' I also love some of the stuff on their live album-- "In the Neck" and "Cattle Grind" especially.

(8) Finitribe, "Let the Tribe Grow" 12". I first heard their song "Detestimony" on "Night Flight," that late-night weekend video program that used to be on the once-sorta-cool USA Network. I love how they use clanging church bells as percussion. Finitribe later wimped out and tried to have a hit album; they should have stuck to this sound.

(9) My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Confessions of a Knife. I always liked the "scary and funny" Thrill Kill Kult more than the "sexy and funny." They were great at lifting samples from cult and horror films (thank god for the Edith Massey samples on "The Days of Swine and Roses"); thanks to them, I searched out Alucarda (also known as Sisters of Satan or Innocents From Hell), a great, campy Mexican horror film about devil-possessed lesbian nuns. My friend Scott Savaiano and I still quote that ridiculous film any chance we get. Oh, and here's the video for "Kooler Than Jesus."

(10) Front 242, Official Version. I wish I could count the number of times I heard "Aggressiva" or "Quite Unusual" in a dance club back then. Or especially that b-side of theirs called "Welcome to Paradise"-- you know, the one that goes "hey, poor/you don't have to be poor anymore/Jesus is here." Does that ever really get old? (Actually, yes, when you're hearing it about 5 times per night at Kansas City's lame THE EDGE nightclub in 1990.) Pairing industrial dance music with Christian televangelist rantings--Cabaret Voltaire did it years earlier, but Front 242 brought it to the goth-kid masses. "Official Version" isn't as heavy (or commercial) as they eventually got, but it's still my favorite. Years and years after first wondering what the initials on the opening track stood for, I finally figured out that it's "What You Hear Is What You Get." I think.

(11) SPK, Zamia Lehmanni--Songs of Byzantine Flowers. Australian noise band who were sort of notorious in my nearby Kansas City at the time for some disturbing show they did with autopsy films playing behind them or something of the sort. Their early music is really difficult, and after this one, they briefly got into embarrassingly kitschy dance-pop. Then leader Graeme Revell got hugely rich & famous doing movie soundtracks, many of them for horror or fantasy films... SIN CITY, STRANGE DAYS, THE CRAFT, DEAD CALM, OPEN WATER, RED PLANET, THE CROW, FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, etc etc etc. But anyway, "Zamia" is a totally beautiful, dreamlike instrumental album, sort of like Dead Can Dance but with more "found" sounds and noises processed into melodies. There was one whole year in my college dorm room when I would play this just before sleep, letting it usher me into dreamland. (Oh, and does anyone know if their name really stood for "surgical penis klinik"?)

(12) Gruesome Twosome, "Hallucination Generation" 12". I don't know much about this band, but any band who lifts its name from a Herschell Gordon Lewis film has got to be good. They used terrific samples ("Hollywood is about as glamorous as my ass") and a great electronic drum sound. I had their Candy From Strangers full-length, but it wasn't nearly this good. And it's got a cool record sleeve by Steven R. Gilmore.

(13) Ministry, Twitch. Yeah, the later guitar-heavy, thrashy Ministry was pretty cool at times. But although they probably denounce this one, with its heavy sequencers and faux-British-accented vocals, I think it's their best. Especially Side One (that's the first four songs, for those of you who've only experienced CDs instead of vinyl) and "Over the Shoulder".

(14) Severed Heads, Come Visit the Big Bigot. Maybe not quite as "EBM" as some of the other bands on this list. Mostly the project of one dude, Tom Ellard; their early records were freaky experimental electronics, and their later ones got very dancefloor-centered. This one, though, was a nice (but still bizarre) halfway point.

(15) The Tear Garden, The Tear Garden ep / Tired Eyes Slowly Burning. Totally beautiful electronic music with twisted, dreamlike lyrics, originally a band consisting of Edward Ka-Spel from the Legendary Pink Dots and cEvin Key from Skinny Puppy. "The Centre Bullet," "Coma," and especially "Ophelia" are all gorgeous songs. (One night in 1987, my car broke down on a deserted road in the center of Kansas, with no one around for miles, and "The Tear Garden" ep was playing over and over and over and over in my car's cassette player, but even after that I didn't get sick of it.) Plus, once again, the great Steven R. Gilmore-designed covers are amazing.

(16) Acid Horse, "No Name, No Slogan" 12". A one-off collaboration between the dudes from Ministry and the dudes from Cabaret Voltaire. Two great, wholly different versions on one 12", a strange mixture of disco and cowboy songs.

(17) Controlled Bleeding, Trudge. A lot of this band's other records were noisier, more brutal and abrasive, oftentimes unlistenable; others are calmer, prettier, sometimes almost New Age-y. "Trudge" was probably their most typically "EBM." I always thought their main dude Paul Lemos was sexy, and I also loved their band name.

(18) Nitzer Ebb, Belief. Often when you mention "industrial" music, people will pick this band as their favorite. I never loved them that much, but "Belief" does have some excellent songs, most specifically "Control I'm Here." And some of their earlier videos are infectiously repetitive and vaguely anarchic and homoerotic. Oddly, MTV wound up loving this group--you couldn't get through a broadcast of "120 Minutes" without 'em. I guess they were probably the closest this music ever got to being popular in college fraternities across the country.

(19) Front Line Assembly, Gashed Senses & Crossfire. Probably the best at miming their countrymates Skinny Puppy. I also liked a lot of their spinoff bands and records, ie Intermix, Synaesthesia, and Noise Unit. As happened with the guy from SPK, these dudes got lots more rich and popular much later, when they started producing gigantic hits for other people and creating worldwide smashes on the dance / DJ side of things.

(20) The Anti-Group, Digitaria. Scary scary scary album. Same folks as Clock DVA. Supposedly has all these subliminal noises and messages, blah blah blah. The end.