Offstage, the three members of Skinny Puppy are friendly, articulate guys who seem thoughtful-sensitive, even-about the music they make.
On stage, Skinny Puppy is the musical equivalent of a back-alley mugging. One of the most violently creative bands currently working the darkest fringes of the pop charts, the Vancouver trio immerses itself in gory visuals and apocalyptic music.
Formed in 1983, Skinny Puppy is now on the leading edge of industrial music, a style of ”anti-music” forged a decade ago by European bands out of tape loops and metallic percussion. Since then, groups such as Front 242, Frontline Assembly, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails and Skinny Puppy have taken the music to new extremes with the aid of computer and keyboard technology.
Skinny Puppy`s eighth album, ”Last Rights” (Capitol/Nettwerk), is filled with nightmare symphonies-a series of dense, pulsing 24-track recordings. The band embellishes its ”audio sculpture” with elaborate stage shows, the latest of which will premiere Friday and Saturday at the Vic Theatre.
A few days before the show, percussionist Cevin Key, keyboardist Dwayne Goettel and vocalist Nivek Ogre (nee Kevin Ogilvie) are relaxing in the basement dressing room of the Vic, where they`re rehearsing this week for a national tour.
”The show is dealing with themes of paranoia and self-persecution,”
Ogre says. ”It`s based on a period of time for me of great delusions and hallucinations. It`s full of visual delights.”
Among them will be a ”movie within a movie” concept in which Ogre will interact with images on a huge screen and be transformed into the hideous
”Mr. Guilt.” The accompanying sonic barrage will include radio signals triggered at random by Key`s drum kit.
Unlike many bands, which use computer technology to ”sample” bits of other records, Skinny Puppy uses sampling machines to record self-generated and random noise, then incorporates these sounds into its show at the touch of a button. The effect is of an aural collage, teetering on chaos, yet tightly controlled by the musicians.
”It`s a reflection of the world,” Ogre says. ”We try to personify things around us that get people ticked off. It becomes cathartic for the audience, a way of getting rid of those demons that infest our brains.”
Ogre`s lyrics address such topics as environmental decay, vivisection, drug addiction and self-determinaton, though they are often obscured by the swirling music and his hound-from-hell vocals.
”We`re not a statement band,” the singer says. ”We`re more into creating moods, and within them there`s a lot more freedom for people to make up their minds and apply the lyrics to themselves and different situations. Some things remain more obscure, but there`s a generated angst or power, there are elements in the cacophony that suggest and imply other things.”
The band revels in information overload, bombarding the listener with more visual and sonic data than can possibly be absorbed in one sitting.
”I think the reason we`ve built an audience is that a lot of other music is almost too easy to get into, with lots of hooks and production, but when you want something to chew on, there`s nothing there,” Goettel says. ”Our music demands that you give something back, interpret it.”
Key and Ogre say the band members` initial intent was to make music they weren`t hearing elsewhere.
”There was a lot of nighttime activity in our lives at that point, so we had need for a soundtrack,” Key says with a laugh. ”Then we ran into a bunch of cassettes from overseas, a compilation of early work by bands like the Legendary Pink Dots and Nocturnal Emissions, which is when we realized that we were making music that fits somewhere.”
The groups began communicating, and Ogre recalls that ”every week there`d be three new mind-bending tapes, and we`d get in mind-bending shape and listen. It was deconstructed, strange. To go back and listen to other music after that was impossible.”
Goettel, a classically trained pianist, says when he joined in 1986, he found Skinny Puppy`s approach to music instantly liberating.
”In all the music I had played before, there wasn`t anything about expressing yourself, just rigid lines,” he says. ”I came into the band with all this knowledge, but that knowledge was very limiting. These guys were sitting around listening to tapes and going: `Yeah! We can make new sounds! We can do anything!` It was a doorway to all these possibilities.”
Adds Key: ”It was like when Elvis and rock `n` roll hit. Industrial and electronic music was like that for us. We used to live for it. We still live for it.”
– On the bill this weekend at the Vic with Skinny Puppy is the best of the British grind-core bands, Godflesh.
Godflesh creates an immense, relentless wall of sound built out of guitars and bass, all played at low-end tunings, while drum machines hammer and scrape. ”Streetcleaner,” the trio`s 1990 American debut, is one of the most menacing albums ever released, blending noxiously ethereal atmospherics with brutal, bulldozer beats.
The recently released follow-up, ”Pure” (Relativity/Earache), is less claustrophobic but hardly more conventional, as the trio`s churning guitars and jackhammer rhythms are twisted into a dance of the macabre by G. Christian Green`s elastic bass.
– On the heels of Jimmie Dale Gilmore`s terrific series of shows last weekend at Schuba`s, Lounge Ax checks in Sunday with another must-see progressive country show by Kevin Welch and David Halley.
Welch moved a decade ago from his native Oklahoma to Nashville, where he has become a respected songwriter. ”But I still related more closely to that Southwestern scene than to a large percentage of what I see in Nashville,” he says.
The Southwest has become the spiritual center of Western beat, which blends elements of country, rock, folk and blues, though its practitioners are scattered throughout the continent. Among them are Gilmore and Halley, both from Texas, and Welch, who titled his new album ”Western Beat” (Reprise).
Welch`s band includes Steve Earle`s former drummer, Harry Stinson, and it was Earle`s success out of Nashville that made Welch realize there might be a niche for his own music.
”There`s always been this underground scene in Nashville that has nothing to do with the glitz and the show biz, and there always will be,”
Welch says. Rather than a particular sound or style, it`s that outsider spirit that defines Western beat and makes it so compelling.
