Skinny Puppy, the Canadian industrial group who have been making music since the early 80s (and featured Bill Leeb from Frontline Assembly for a short while) are releasing their next full length album, entitled Weapon on May 28th. This is their first album of new material since 2011's hanDover (OhGr's solo album unDeveloped was released earlier the same year). This new album, Weapon seems to be concerned with gun culture, judging by the press release and tracklisting. Skinny Puppy have always been a political band, engaging in issues such as equal rights, animal rights, etc... I look forward to this new album from Nivek OhGr and Cevin Key. Here is the press release and tracklisting..
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This stunning new album stands as a commentary on that which it is named after, the Weapon, or more specifically, to the concurrent glorification of the gun culture and simultaneous horror at the devastation the gun can cause. Given this view, the pop undertones of the albums opening wornin' and the compelling counterpoint of the vocals and lyrics seem to reflect our mass media homogenization of an instrument of death into an entertainment centerpiece. illisiT could then be focusing on the authoritarian control applied to us under the guise of protecting us from the criminal element. Though possibly it is from the view of the average citizen, arming themselves against the threat of each other. The more it is analyzed, the more it could be pondered on varying levels. Perhaps the classic Skinny Puppy sounds evident in the song solvent are a nod to not only the past, but to a bleak Orwellian future, cycle of the weapon leads only to power in the hands of those who have no fear of using it. Are we facing a 1984 dystopia filtered through a Kafkaesque lens? A world where the illusion of power given to the private citizen afforded ownership of a weapon distracts them from the Big Brother drones that watch overhead?
Parallels could certainly be drawn from our own society to a track like tsudanama, where the ever building menace of the mechanized rhythms crashes over the listener in waves as the vocals at times seem to take the tone of the voice of protest, standing against the inevitable tide of the dystopian path of progress. Then does plasiCage implore the listener to take up the fight against a gun worship culture and the spiraling towards oligarchy? Or are the mournful tones terminal a funeral dirge for our society?
Could the weapon be the gun, or the one who wields it? Is it in creating an arms race among the populace, or does it lie in the resulting authoritarian control given to those who are charged with protecting us from ourselves? Is it the power to profit from the cycle? Is it the singular act of speaking against the conditioning of our thoughts and actions?
01. wornin'
02. illisiT
03. saLvo
04. gLowbeL
05. solvent
06. paragUn
07. survivalisto
08. tsudanama
09. plastiCage
10. terminal
And here are some classic Skinny Puppy tracks to hold you over.....
Smothered Hope
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