Skinny Puppy
Mythmaker
Synthetic Symphony/SPV
Still not Chubby Kitty
What exactly happened to industrial? A decade or so ago Coil, Godflesh, NIN, Alec Empire, Fear Factory, and even Skinny Puppy on swansong The Process were still building fantastical spiral architectures out of the noisy humming fabric of modern machine-cradled life. Then everything went cold and deaf. The factory was shut down with no possibility of outsourcing. Goth-EBM danced on in its feebly darkened clubs. Ant-Zen still puts out records, but when the last memorable Throbbing Gristle moment in strictly non-underground music was the first 30 seconds of Depeche Mode's Playing the Angel in 2005, what gives?
For SP devotees, 2004's The Greater Wrong of the Right return was a bit like Helmet's Size Matters—the joy you feel about them being back again makes you love the record regardless of the mere incongruity of its existence. Mythmaker too sees SP operating as a band without an easily identifiable external framework of reference. There's more of Ogre's stomping anti-pop here than cEvin Key's brap-jazz-electro-beepage; there's shades of what could conceivably be nods to Venetian Snares' goth abstract spazz-sentimentalism, and more the Skinny Puppy of "Candle" and "Killing Game" than of "Chainsaw" or "Tormentor"; plus a worldview where, like Tool's 10,000 Days, elegiac lament and exhausted powerlessness have taken the place of anger-is-an-energy righteous rage.
SP releases do tend to make more sense ages after the fact, and nothing's changed here: Mythmaker is certainly another dizzying ride through jittery confused states and Hellraiser Gardens of Eden, even though this time we seem to be hurtling through the shadowy corridors of disembodied international globalist power structures rather than those of a blood-spattered vivisection division. Time for SP fans to give up on them? Not even close. —Daniel Lukes
