VIVISectVI
by Skinny Puppy

From junodog4 07/28/2013 19:50 | #82620

If you can get through the bleak tone and jarring noise, this album has a pretty scathing message about animal rights. The sound and lyrics together are hard to ignore.

The output is both surreal and nightmarish, fueled by angst, doubt, fear, rage, uncertainty and unrelenting introspection. Imagine being inside a world designed by Edvard Munch and Salvadore Dali while a horror movie is projected on the wall and a radio turned up too loud spits out war coverage news. The sound often intentionally lacks cohesion allowing the music and lyrics to wildly ramble along to some bizarre stream of consciousness. Chopped phrases are parsed together to form a sort of dark poetic montage as opposed to even attepting sentence structure. The music follows a similar process whereby spoken samples, noises, electronic stabs and harsh, often reverse sounding, beats come together forming a wicked, evil brew. To the neophyte listener the sound is imposing ans scary barely bordering on "music". However it really does start to make sense with time. I think that is the true brilliance of this album; after hundreds of listens the hidden beauty is not only apparent, it's glaringly obvious. My friends are always amazed that I can clearly hear every word and discern each melody. Somehow this album that at first seems like a wall of noise and chaos seeps into your soul and becomes as clean to you personally as though it were a single violin.

If you find that the album is just too dense and impenetrable then focus on the first half which is slightly more direct. The singles "Who's Laughing Now?" and "Testure" have fairly accessible beats. Another favorite from the first half, "Harsh Stone White", is very creepy but there is also clarity. Industrial heads revere this album as one of the all-time greats; it has always been a Puppy fan favorite probably 2nd only to 'Too Dark Park'. The album, and the band in general, will be difficult for newcomers, requiring a conscious effort to fight through the madness. This isn't easy listening, but nothing that matters is easy.