First of all I want to express how excited I am about this tour because I think it’s about fucking time that newschool Industrial bands like Skinny Puppy have crossover Noise/Noise Rock acts as openers.
I totally sense a merging of the outdated Industrial scene and the ever-expanding Noise scene. I think Industrial as a movement will see a return to its origins embracing atonal sounds and moving further away from the whole 4/4 techno beat and the heavy metal aesthetic that has plagued the genre for more than two decades. (Don’t get me wrong I love bands like Ministry and Skinny Puppy who do this but I think that sound is now over and Industrial needs to rediscover its Experimental roots).
Here is my review of the 6/9/07 show at Nokia Theater NYC:
Sadly I got to the venue a bit late after smoking a blunt at my friend’s apartment and missed Otto von Schirach. The venue was very nice and spacious. Cool lighting, great atmosphere. Lots of goths crawled out of the woodwork for this one haha. There must have about 1,000 people there altogether which really impressed me.
Sightings was fucking amazing. Tribal drumming, awesome shifts and song structures. They were very intense and they sounded fucking great on the sound system in Nokia Theatre. This is the second time I’ve seen Sightings and in my experience they just keep getting better. A true experimental band, challening the audience (including myself) but never too cool to get into a nice groove and get people riled up. I noticed some of the lame techno goths kind of looking baffled or unsure of how to respond to the music because it wasn’t a 4/4 stomper. They played some really awesome material that I had never heard. One song towards the end had a kind of bluesy riff to it that almost reminded me of Lightning Bolt for a minute. Great vocals, very emotional and unique. They ended with an epic closing song that began with metal scrapes and gurgles and progressed into this intense post rock mantra repeating a succession of notes over and over getting more and more distorted and huge in scope. Really fucking impressive. Can’t say enough good about this opening performance. At the end, they got a decent response from the crowd, but not overwhelmingly positive. I got the sense that a lot of people seemed puzzled overall, as though they were expecting a Skinny Puppy clone to open instead. I heard about 2 or 3 people booing, which REALLY infuriated me. The hecklers were fat goth white trash, however.
Skinny Puppy was up next and they were very intense. The drummer echoed the drum machine programming and pre-recorded backing tracks perfectly. Totally on synch. One thing I love about Skinny Puppy is their ability to tack something that is essentially a techno track with a pretty simple song structure and turn it into this intense epic thing with powerful drum fills that a reminiscent of Pink Floyd and the soaring synths. cEVIN kEY was on keyboards and seemed to be triggering the songs. I’m not a huge fan of some of their newer material, but I thought it was very well done live and I was definitely more turned on after hearing the new stuff live (particularly ‘Ugli’ which I hated when I first heard it).
They played a pretty good range of all their material, mostly hits and danceable tracks. Some nice surprises included b-sides off of Rabies and The Process. Only one songs from TGWOTR was played. Overall I thought the set was very energetic and fun, and it is clear that Skinny Puppy is still good at what they do and still loves doing it. The crowd was really into it and you could feel that this is not a band that is down for the count. Some criticism I have for the show is that
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The visuals were lacking. Ogre just kind of kept going behind this tent or screen covered in blood and then re-emerging. The last tour had much better visuals with a projector screen etc. There were some videos projected on the stage, but they seemed blurred and I was unable to make out specific images.
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Too many backing tracks! There was guitar in a lot of the songs, but no live guitarist. I really got the feeling that a lot of the music was just sequenced and pre-recorded, and it was kind of disappointing to hear all those sounds that I knew were just coming from a computer. They really need more people on stage to make it believable. The inclusion of so much backing material almost made me feel as though I was at a Pop concert like N’Sync.
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There was not enough variation in the setlist. All of the songs they played were 4/4 beat oriented dance tracks with similar tempo with the exception of “Fascist Jock Itch” and some stuff of The Process like “Amnesia” and “Hardset Head” which were nice surprises. Overall there were too many dance tracks. A long brap in between would have been very nice. They provided random interludes of improv between songs, but none of those last long enough to be considered a full-on brap. Also I noticed that nothing was played from Last Rights, which I consider to be their best album. I think some of the more abstract stuff from that album might have contrasted well sandwiched in between the dance tracks like “Dig It” “Testure” etc.
Overall the show was excellent and I was pleasantly surpised. “Fascist Jock Itch” really got the crowd moving in a frenzied mosh pit and the inclusion of stuff from The Process was really cool. Especially awesome was the last encore, which consisted of “Far Too Frail” followed by “Blue Serge”. The difference in tempo between these two songs resulted in people going absolutely ape shit dancing and throbbign to the song “Blue Serge” and made me wish they had included more songs with varying tempos to provide a bit more variation to the setlist. I was struck in turns by how relavent Skinny Puppy still is in on the one hand (they were playing songs from the 80s that would still sound cutting edge compared to stuff on the radio today) and how outdated they are (the majority of their fan base seems to require a 4/4 beat in order to digest the accompanying Industrial sound experiments). At times I felt almost as if I was watching a pop act or boy band with all of the backing tapes, the dramatic delivery of the vocals, and the dancefloor anthems that made up their set. Skinny Puppy always seems to be stuck between their desire to experiment and challenge, and their knack for writing songs that are dancefloor-friendly and contain strong elements of modern pop music. I thought that Sightings’ performance and the music they played was ultimately far more artistic and challenging than Puppy’s immediatley accessible 4/4 dance grooves. They really challenged the audience and made them think, whereas Puppy seemed to discard the experiments of yore and go for the songs that would make people shake their ass without hesitation. I am sure I was in the minority of people who enjoyed Sightings more than Skinny Puppy, but that is to be expected. Both bands clearly owned the stage and had amazing performances, and I would see both again and recommend them to others without hesitation.