Photo credit: Rhianna O'Shea
Unlike many enduringly popular genres, whose stylistic roots are often fairly easy to trace if still fascinating, industrial music’s particular branch on the evolutionary tree springs from some rather diverse and esoteric places. Since its genesis in the darkly confrontational post-punk performance art of Throbbing Gristle and Suicide, among other avant-garde figures, elements of just about everything, from ambient to house to thrash, have been absorbed and synthesized, resulting in any number of niche subgenres that nevertheless still share an instantly recognizable identity. Yet while experimentalism is built into its very DNA, industrial’s eclectic palette was really solidified by a wave of mid-’80s iconoclasts, notably the hugely influential Vancouver outfit Skinny Puppy, who, continuing the scene’s other grand tradition of making terrible puns, brought their “Down the SocioPath” tour to the Rave Monday night.
Getting things started off was Los Angeles EBM duo Youth Code, whose machine-gun sound is pretty impressive considering they’ve only been active for three years, all throbbing bass, whip-crack snares and vicious male-female vocals, but where they run into trouble is putting it across live. There’s certainly nothing wrong with your band being little more than two people, a bank of samplers and couple of a microphones, but when your stage presence consists mostly of jumping up and down whilst punching the air, it’s all too easy for an audience’s attention to wander. Add in some awkward between-song banter (“This is industrial, not your grandmother’s cross stich class!”), and it made for a somewhat stilted, unpolished outing, but the songs, including selections from their new Anagnorisis 7”, made them more than worth watching.
While Youth Code was well received by the black-clad masses, excitement ran higher as they waited for the headliners to appear. After slowly filtering onstage, the band created a cacophonous entrance for lead singer Nivek Ogre, who emerged clad in a hooded white robe. Soon the hood disappeared, revealing a ghoulishly featureless mask and finally his actual face, but that was just the start to the theatrics. As they burned through a career-spanning set, hitting hardest on classics like “Candle” and “Tin Omen,” a weird werewolf/stagehand hybrid with glowing red eyes occasionally crept out and affixed a new spike into Ogre’s costume, each successive “wound” bleeding profusely until he resembled some gruesome human pincushion. The sounds they pioneered may be familiar by now, but Skinny Puppy themselves are still surprising after all these years.
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