Although I very seldom engage in the “rawk-enhancing” vice of copious drug use these days, I seem to get wasted on the amazing sounds coming out of the metal underground. The metal genre has splintered into a zillion sub-genres and cliques over the last 20 years. It seemed inevitable that after the relatively stagnant late-nineties, that paradigm smashing bands would emerge to take their shot at reinventing the wheel.
There seems to be a dying breed—those willing to constantly experiment, no matter what the risk. Mad scientists locked away in their subsonic labs, creating aural napalm. I mean Al Jourgenson is producing the new Limp Bizkit turd. Where’d all the evil geniuses go? As always, they went underground.
When industrial music first reared its ugly, brain-damaged head, I was greatly intrigued by its sheer mockery of everything before it. Rawk was deconstructed, placed in a bloody test-tube, stripped of its warmth and finally, shit out into an evil, two-headed mutant. Early innovators like J.G. Thirlwell, Boyd Rice, Coil, Skinny Puppy, Current 93 and Whitehouse seemed to live by the old adage, “No Pain, No Gain”. Armed only with homemade tape loops of clanging trash can lids, a neighbour’s kid torturing a cat or airplane crashes, the original practitioners of the extreme electronic scene were degenerate sociopaths. This of course, is what made them so interesting. As with all promising musical movements, the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode and Marilyn Manson reduced it to contrived, self-pitying and self-important drivel.
Many of the recent metal gods have taken some inspiration from the industrial stuff. It definitely has crept into the fiendish snarl of the Scandinavian Viking set, as well as unfortunately, the abysmal swill of the nu-metallers. Thankfully, there seems to be enough twisted visionaries out there like Today Is The Day and Devin Townsend.
I’ll never forget the first time I heard Strapping Young Lad. I was simultaneously terrified and invigorated, for HERE was something truly unlike anything I’d ever allowed into my topsy-turvy psyche. Music that positively detonated inside your rapidly deafening ears! It kinda resembled industrial, like a retarded, reptilian caricature, only 25 times more confrontational. A fucking slobbering gila monster! The track was, “Oh My Fucking God” an unrelenting assault that climaxed with: “Okay all of you…GET DOWN and SUCK… my buddies’….COCK!” — Clichés clenched into a massive fist.
With their latest gob’o bile, “SYL”, the song titles tell the story: “Dire”, truly is. “Rape Song” is a song that rapes you. And “Devour”? Figure it out for yourselves. Devin Townsend twists every familiar metal riff, phrase and nuance into something completely alien. This disc is so over the top, you find yourself waiting for a guest appearance from Slymenstra Hymen. This is no freak show however—just pure, undiluted rage filtered through the mind of a metal savant.