Before they formed My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Chicagoans Frank Nardiello and Marston Daley had become expert at concocting cheap musical thrills to amuse themselves.
”I lived across the street from Frank,” Daley says. ”He`d bring over a six-pack, we`d drink, make music, listen to it and laugh for hours. That was our source of entertainment for nearly a year.
”Then things started happening and people started to take us seriously. And we said, `Oh my God, maybe we should start to take ourselves a little more seriously.` ”
Not quite.
Nardiello transformed himself into singer Groovy Mann; Daley became keyboardist Buzz McCoy. Together they would compose, record and perform an ongoing story-movie-soap opera dubbed ”My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult.”
”We thought of ourselves as the National Enquirer of rock,” Daley says. The duo was signed to Chicago-based Wax Trax Records and began churning out a stream of dance records.
The duo`s latest album, ”Sexplosion,” has already sold more than 70,000 copies, according to Wax Trax President Jim Nash, and is bulleting up the college charts.
Thrill Kill Kult, abetted by three musicians and three singer/dancers, will perform Saturday at the Riviera.
Thrill Kill`s music is pure escapism. Its first album, ”Confessions of a Knife,” was dark and hard-edged, loaded with distorted, ”Exorcist”-style vocals, churning rhythms and Gothic imagery.
”Sexplosion” is a lighter, campier dance record that celebrates and satirizes sex.
”We`re making fun, silly disco records,” Daley says. ”I know disco isn`t a cool term, but it`s what we listened to when we were younger; it was all around.
”In high school, we used to hang out at gay bars on Friday and Saturday nights because those were the only places that would let us in, since we were under age. Now when we`re at home, we listen to `70s disco records.”
”We love James Bond, the `50s, `Faster Pussycat,` that whole trashy sex vibe,” he says with a laugh.
”All of the themes we write about (organized religion, Satanism, slasher movies, sex) are just toys. We find a great deal of humor in everyday things, and we regurgitate that in our music.”
Using a multitude of keyboard-based rhythms, bits of movie dialogue and other ”sampled” sound effects and musical riffs, Thrill Kill`s records are more like sound collages than musical compositions.
”We`re definitely not musicians. We`re more like oral painters,” Daley says. ”I used to be a good piano player when I was about 14, but I`m all thumbs now.”
He says, however, that he has been regaining his facility on the keyboards, and that much of the band`s show will be performed live.
”We met the rest of the band in a bar,” a few weeks before the latest tour started, Daley says. On a previous tour, Thrill Kill relied on ”sensory overload” and visual overkill to ”make people pay attention.”
”Now we`ve sort of refined things,” the keyboardist says. ”It`s still an attention-getter, but we know a few more things.”
Still, Thrill Kill`s visual presentation-its videos and stage show-remains central to its concept.
Daley says the group`s next record, a rock opera about ”a kid who listens to too much heavy metal and goes crazy, a typical tabloidesque story blown way out of proportion,” will be accompanied by a full-length film.
Apparently it will be released on a major label. Wax Trax`s Nash said Daley and Nardiello told him a few weeks ago that they would be jumping to another record company to finance the project.
If so, Thrill Kill will follow in the footsteps of other groups such as Ministry, the KLF and Front 242 that were launched by Wax Trax and then left for big-label dollars. Nash was understandably bitter: ”I feel like I`ve been stabbed in the back.”
Daley and Nardiello could not be reached for comment after the move was announced, but Daley hinted at it in the weeks before ”Sexplosion” was released: ”I want to own a house in five years. I want things to progress beyond the point we`re at now. We`d stop doing this if it wasn`t fun, and the only way to have fun is to keep progressing.”
