By: Stuart Benjamin
Killing Joke | website | facebook | twitter |
Released on October 23, 2015 via Spinefarm
Indulge me, if you will, in a shaggy dog story.
Many years ago, when I was young and easy under the apple boughs, my local of choice was a pub called The Uplands Tavern. The Tav, as it was known, once used to be called The Uplands Hotel and it was there where my Dad used to drink and – long before both me and Dad – it was a regular haunt of the young Dylan Thomas. The Tav also had a side room called ‘The Dylan Thomas snug’ in commemoration of the nascent bard of Swansea and his hard-drinking high-jinks.
It was in the snug, where I sat pint in hand, when my comrade-in-arms Benny sidled up to me, plastic bag in his sweaty paws.
“Stu”, he said, “You like some weird crap.” Was his opening gambit.
“Well…uh…yeah.” As you can see, my twenty-year old counterpart had some trouble with witty ripostes.
“What it is, see…” Benny continued, “…there’s this girl I’ve been trying to get off with for ages.” There was always a girl with Benny, the best thing to do was make appropriate sympathetic noises. “Anyway, it’s not happening, but she likes this band so when she came round mine I had this music playing. It didn’t get me anywhere. It’s bloody awful, dreadful I think. But I thought you’d probably like it.”
With that he pulled out a cassette (ask your mum) from his plastic bag and slid it across the table. It was Revelations, the third album by Killing Joke. I bought Benny a pint. Benny’s failed attempts at l’amour avec une fille notwithstanding, it was something of a revelation to me – I hadn’t heard music like this before, it was compelling, relentless, and most importantly to twenty-year old me, really great when you played it loud. “What’s this rubbish?” my folks would say. Job done.
That I’ve told you this story is my long winded-way of saying that those who dig Killing Joke from the off, find them becoming a permanent fixture in their lives forever. Many of you who have followed The Joke won’t waste time with a review – you’re part of the cult, part of the movement, part of the whispered secret, and you’ll buy it anyway. But, here it is – Pylon – although after over 35-years and some 14 studio albums, almost as many live albums, and countless collections, bootlegs, and special releases is there anything new we can say?
This is a band whose members’ extra-curricula activities over that history include a sojourn in Iceland to survive the impending apocalypse (it didn’t happen), being awarded Le Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres for services to contemporary classical music, and production duties for a roster of well-known artists that would keep you name-dropping for the rest of your natural. Like the Coen Brothers’ Dude, they endure. Like cockroaches they’ve survived the fall of humanity. In fact if it were all to end tomorrow, Killing Joke probably would by some miracle survive, and continue to yell their shamanic proclamations like the mystic seers that they are.
With so much going on outside the band, so many laurels to rest on, will the record have the hunger and power of the albums that made us fall in love with them in the first place? Too often do we buy records because we feel a loyalty so to do, we’ll tolerate the ones we don’t like so much in the hope that the next one will be The One. You can’t help having these feeling about a band which has such a rich history and has been in your life for so long and – for fuck’s sake – we don’t want them to be the Rolling bloody Stones.
Well, we needn’t have feared, Pylon is – to my mind – one of the great Killing Joke albums. Every song delivers in spades, with no hint of “oh that’s just filler”. It grabs your attention like the cops busting in your front door in a early morning raid, you sit transfixed as the whole thing bludgeons out of the speakers like truncheon bearing rozzers.
Pylon kicks off with ‘Autonomous Zone’ and from the moment it thunders into life we know we’re amongst old friends. The band reverted a few years ago to it’s original line-up – Jaz, Geordie, Big Paul, and Youth – and ‘Autonomous Zone’ feels like they’ve never been away, whether it’s Youth and Paul’s thundering rhythm section, sweeping you away like a tsunami, or Geordie’s face-shredding guitars one minute screeching like an exploding jet engine, or blistering with de-tuned melodies, the whole effect is like being strapped to a chair in a wind-tunnel, and over all the cacophony comes Jaz’s vocals sometimes sweet, sometimes snarling, always angry, complimented by his low key synthesisers.
Every song on the album is classic Joke – the industrial rock throb of ‘I Am The Virus’, the soaring majesty of ‘Euphoria’, will be long remembered alongside well loved tracks from the Killing Joke canon such as ‘Love Like Blood’, ‘New Day’ and ‘In Cythera’. Actually, I’d say the whole thing compares favourably to the album Night Time – as like that record it has enough hooky songs without compromising any of the politics.
And if we are going to talk about Killing Joke, we have to talk about the politics. Jaz Coleman’s disgust with Western politics in general is well known and documented. On this album too we see a deep and clinical dissection of the politics of Capitalism, the homogenisation of culture, the complacency of society, and the powerlessness of the individual. In many ways one of the first things that got me into Killing Joke was the fact that they were a band who had a voice, very similar politics to myself, and were able to express opinions which I felt unable to do. On Pylon, songs such as ‘New Cold War’, ‘War On Freedom’, ‘New Jerusalem’ (all atypical Joke titles by the way), really do chime with my own view of the world. Coleman is so aware that we live in very dangerous times – I’d be pushed to say he’s a cynic – I find him more than a little disappointed, in these songs, that a humanity that could potentially do so much, throws all its opportunities away for so little and is more than happy to be controlled. Pylon then, is the cold shower we need to shake us from our stupor. A Corbyn-esque shot in the arm? I’ll let you decide.
There’s also, thematically, a mistrust of technology – Big Buzz, Dawn Of The Hive, Delete – as well as covering other subjects also hint at a humanity in thrall and enslaved by technology rather than freed by it. Look how many goons vote on X-Factor every week, democracy by clicking on ‘like’, ‘favourite’, or ‘share’ – it’ll only end badly, and I think that’s hinted at in the final number Into the Unknown.
The other thing I need to note, particularly after multiple listens to this record, was the sheer influence that Killing Joke has had on a lot of the music of the last thirty-years. I’m sure a new listener would pick up Pylon and say, that it sounds like Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Metallica, and so on. Truth is, Joke wrote the blueprint for industrial rock and this record sounds as fresh and diverse as anything that any of those bands have produced in recent years. I also found myself wondering how they do it, impressed, in awe in fact, of the hunger to create, and the anger at our unequal world, which forces Killing Joke to return, time and again, to the cauldron of creativity that keeps a record such as Pylon vital listening.
I truly believe everyone should have at least one Killing Joke record, so why not this one? I thought the best place to start would be with my own feral progeny: I put Pylon on in the car.
“Dad, what’s this rubbish?” my kids said to me.
Job done.
