Okay, I like this. I like this a lot. I think they melding of post-punk (which is first and foremost what this sounds like) with some more heavy riffs and some cool industrial parts and some big anthemic stuff really makes for a beautiful and engaging album.
Killing Joke have puzzled me for years. Before I had ever really heard anything by them and only knew the name, their reputation as dark industrial metal influencers on Ministry and stuff, and I was familiar with this classic album cover, I expected them to be pretty hardcore and hard to get into for the uninitiated. I kind of filed them into the Pop Group and The Fall file of influential but pretty harsh post punk. Somewhere along the line, maybe 10 years ago, I gave this album one spin and was surpirised to find anthemic, catchy, moody, at times heavy post punk that actually is a great intro into this world of post punk.
Anyway, this is a good middle ground album - not saying it's "mid" - just not so cold and uncompromising as to take awhile for me to dig (like Closer or something) and not so clearly BIG and anthemic and catchy that I feel it's a bit cheap (some early U2 stuff for example), not fully falling into the somber, boring post-punk sleepiness that tends to turn me off, while also not leaning very heavily into "rocking" punk riffs or mildly metallic territory (just hints). Not as dancy and exciting as Gang of Four while still having moments where the groove is irresistable (like on the closer, "Change". There are actually beautiful and kinda uplifting choruses here that sound like they gave inspiration to M83 (I'm a musical noob so that was what I first thought of on songs like "The Wait".).
Track for track, this is a lean and nice rock album with enough variations and sonic surprises to keep it engaging. Every one of the 9 songs here has something good about it. But especially love that run at the beginning with "Requiem", "Wardance", "Tomorrow's World", "Bloodsport", "The Wait", and "Complications" all being absolute bangers.
I can't fully hear the Amebix influence, or the influence Killing Joke had on Amebix, on this album if I'm being honest. I mean this being late 1980, I suppose any band that melded moody post punk and somewhat gothic atmospheres with savage hardcore and/or metal could be said to be partially in Killing Joke's shadow. But the connection to my ears is slight. Maybe the other pre 1985 Killing Joke albums point the way to Crust legends Amebix more.
Anyway, I like this a lot. As someone who generally doesn't love Post Punk nearly as much as most other genres and sub genres of punk, this easily soarded high in my personal "Post Punk Favorites List". _________________ -Ryan
My favorite Killing Joke stuff is definitely when they refined their sound in the mid-80s. Let's just say they were right to be mad in the early 90s when their sound was getting a little more popular and they weren't...
I mean, actually I listened to the remaster of this which was relatively recently put on streaming services. Same 4 tracks, majorly cleaned up and sharper production (as far as I have heard - haven't heard the original EP, Pre-Remaster), tracks in different order, same album art, new name - Nervous System EP.
And... it's also great! I like this more bright and bouncy sound that Killing Joke were tapping into. Some aspects of their sound lived on in their debut LP a year or so later, such as the aggressive and up-front rhythms, but a lot of their style changed. This is a weird, electro dance punk thing at times with some cool spastic guitar sounds and just a lot of that wide-eyed exploratory early post punk spirit. Highly recommended. _________________ -Ryan
My favorite Killing Joke stuff is definitely when they refined their sound in the mid-80s. Let's just say they were right to be mad in the early 90s when their sound was getting a little more popular and they weren't...
Everyone from Reznor to Cobain to Konietzko loved their shit.
yeah, I can hear it. Their influence is wide and pervasive. I just read some articles about this major influence and listened to some examples of as well and I am finally connecting the dots on why this band was sort of this Monolith, this band spoken of with great respect when I was too young to understand why and before the internet made it easy for 12 year old me to just listen to their music.
My older sister was way WAY into NIN, Manson, KMFDM, Skinny Puppy, Ministry etc etc, and so I grew up with so many of the major influencees of the 90s who shaped rock and industrial rock culture of the 90s. The bands I heard OF the most without actually hearing them were Joy Division, Killing Joke and The Cure.
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Oh and I am planning on giving more listens to later Killing Joke. As of now the albums I have heard by them more than once on a whim are their debut from 1980 and their Industrial Metal album from 2006 or so Hosannas... And those are so absurdly different sounding it's hard to believe its the same band. Both albums are great. _________________ -Ryan
I mean this being late 1980, I suppose any band that melded moody post punk and somewhat gothic atmospheres with savage hardcore and/or metal could be said to be partially in Killing Joke's shadow. But the connection to my ears is slight.
Forgive me for kibbutzing, but the KJ debut LP is especially close to my heart, as they say — it's one of those albums I actually heard before it even came out, since I was in college radio at the time and we used to have people take the albums home and write reviews that we'd tape to the album covers to tell the DJ's how the songs ended (in order to promote better segues and less dead air). So I think I ran out and bought my own copy literally on the day it first appeared in the local record store. There actually were some precursors to their sound — just from the stuff that I already knew about, there were two Buzzcocks tracks, "Moving Away From the Pulsebeat" and "Late for the Train," and also the Ruts' "S.U.S." and "Savage Circle," that were all released before this. (You could almost make a case for the Banshees' Join Hands album too, or at least parts of it.) But I don't think anybody had done a whole album of that stuff before this one. If somebody did, I still don't know about it.
The thing is, this sound wasn't really all that feasible for most new/upcoming bands in the late 70s. When you turned up the bass and drums like that in an all-analog studio, it reduced your headroom and if you didn't know what you were doing, it would sludge up your mix — most producers hated "sludgey" at the time, so they wouldn't do it, but the KJ album was self-produced (and that may be why). They did what they wanted, but they also had a very talented engineer named Phil Harding working with them in the studio to ensure that they didn't screw it up. These days, there are digital tools to optimize all your levels and frequencies, yada yada, and everybody has them, but those obviously didn't exist then.
Just to get that guitar sound, you had to run your guitar through a "Rat"-style distortion pedal (not an overdrive or fuzz pedal, those are tonally different) and also a flanger, but affordable stomp-box flangers didn't really hit the market until 1975-76. Before that, you had to either build some complex circuit yourself (like Boston's Tom Scholz did) or else do it the old-fashioned way, with tape decks, and you couldn't do that in a live setting. On top of that, KJ's reverb sound is all digital, and digital reverb was practically a brand-new thing when their debut LP was being made (the snare sound is actually fairly dry, compared to an early overdriven-reverb sound like Frida's "I Know Something's Going On" two years later). By the mid-80s, everyone was going nuts with the digital reverbs, so the KJ album actually sounds sort of restrained and tasteful today, by comparison.
The guitar sound is what hooked me, because I played guitar and wanted that sound too, for myself... But for most people, what really set the KJ debut album apart when it first came out were the vocals. They were going for a "tribal," guttural, "primitive" vocal sound and they got it, mostly because nobody was around to tell them they couldn't. If they'd been on a major label with a name producer, I simply cannot imagine they would have been allowed to sound like that, and the album (and maybe the band, too) probably would have been forgotten. Instead, it turned out so well that other bands started trying to copy them — in terms of the number of bands they influenced and the extent to which they influenced them, I'd put them up with the Velvets and Black Sabbath, definitely. Not quite in Beatles/Stones territory, but not all that far off, either.
And of course, everybody started buying flangers too, including me. I still have mine, and it still works! (Meanwhile, the delay and chorus pedals I bought to sound like U2 are both toast at this point.) 🙄
MercuryTurn your back on the pay-you-back last callProfile St. Louis
@Madhattanjack, that was a great and very technical post. I like getting this side of it from people who know or are aware of the detailed ins and outs of how sounds are produced. Was the sound of Gang of Four related to the unique sound of Killing Joke? I ask because I can hear some similarities especially in the more driving and danc-y moments on Killing Joke's debut to the debut Gang of Four album a year or so earlier. _________________ -Ryan
@Madhattanjack, that was a great and very technical post. I like getting this side of it from people who know or are aware of the detailed ins and outs of how sounds are produced. Was the sound of Gang of Four related to the unique sound of Killing Joke? I ask because I can hear some similarities especially in the more driving and danc-y moments on Killing Joke's debut to the debut Gang of Four album a year or so earlier.
+1. A most excellent kibbutz!
AND, The Ruts rule! The Crack is one of my favorite Punk albums!!!
Madhattanjack, that was a great and very technical post. I like getting this side of it from people who know or are aware of the detailed ins and outs of how sounds are produced. Was the sound of Gang of Four related to the unique sound of Killing Joke? I ask because I can hear some similarities especially in the more driving and danc-y moments on Killing Joke's debut to the debut Gang of Four album a year or so earlier.
Well... thanks (!) and while I obviously wasn't in the studio with any of those guys, there are some articles out there about how these sounds were "achieved" — this one is pretty good for the Andy Gill sound. He was actually using a solid-state (as opposed to tube) amp, and apparently he was even using the amp's built-in distortion (which most people didn't do if they could help it, since it would sound kind of "tinny" on most amps). Also, he was playing Fender guitars, which sound brighter, thinner, and more "biting" under distortion than Gibson Les Pauls (Geordie from KJ always played Gibsons — the Wikipedia article on him is probably fairly accurate, at least about that).
So... long story short, I wouldn't say they were related all that much, other than that the whole riffing-over-big-pounding-drums approach was similar, and you could dance to it, and they showed up around the same time. The main thing technically about Gang of Four is that on their first two albums, they deliberately wanted to sound as dry as possible. If you listen to their very first EP though, the Damaged Goods EP, you can hear the difference: They're in the studio for the first time, they're not sure of what they're doing, so they're not quite at the point of saying "no, we don't want this" even though they're credited as having produced the record themselves. So you can hear some reverb and maybe even a little "slap"-delay on the guitar, probably because the guy running the studio is telling them "this is how it's supposed to be done."
Same song on the first album, all the reverb is gone, and it sounds really in-your-face and practically airless, even the drums. KJ didn't do that at all — I don't know if they specifically wanted to sound huge, but they were definitely not turning any of the effects down (much less off) in the studio.
I think this is because Go4 just wanted to sound more danceable, whereas KJ were more like regular headbangers and didn't care quite as much about people dancing to them.
MercuryTurn your back on the pay-you-back last callProfile St. Louis
yeah I see what you mean. Thinking of it and kind of remembering back to last time I heard Entertainment! and yeah lol production-wise and in many ways those 2 post punk classics are diametrically opposed! Perhaps musically like some of the riffs and bass lines and drumming patterns reminded me of each other, hard to say.
Yet another cool description. appreciated it. _________________ -Ryan
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