Noise Pollution #4: Chemtrails, Hosannas, Bloody Elections
"Here, listen to this," Jef said as he handed me a paper bag while getting into the car. "It’s important." The time was 2005 and I was picking him up at the Tower Records on the Strip in LA, riding around in a shitty rental car that I lied to Hertz and said wouldn’t leave the city. This was the "final" US Krieg "tour" and I ended up driving the fucking thing across like five states and over a nail in the road. That’s all a story for my memoir once I stop writing it in my head and commit it to paper. What Jef handed me was a CD copy of Killing Joke's Revelations, and he did it with the gravity of a father handing down the family sword to the son who's supposed to use it to slay a fucking dragon.
The CD itself was cracked inside the case and crumbled out like dust when I opened it so it’s not like I had the chance to listen to it. That was a terrific metaphor for 2005. Actually 2004-2011 as a whole, but again, I've got a memoir to write.
The early-mid 2000s were the time where I began really trying to branch out into other genres beyond just metal. I already had a lot of the NYC 1960s-80s thing down thanks to Lou Reed, the "Trainspotting" soundtrack and Please Kill Me, and I had a girlfriend at the time whose knowledge of what would be deemed "college rock" in the late 1980s would help me find a lot of weird (to me, at the time, etc) shit, but Jef would turn out to be the biggest pusher of music from outside my (then) limited scope. I only knew of Killing Joke from the "Millenium" video that MTV played 1.5 times in the early 1990s. I remembered thinking it was cool, that it reminded me of Psalm 69 a bit. but I was also a child, so who the fuck knows. While Jef seemed crushed that the CD was shattered, my mind was elsewhere, and so it wasn't for a few months when Tower Records announced their bankruptcy and liquidation that I would pick up a Killing Joke album again, this time 1980's self-titled debut. This was also around the time I was becoming obsessed with Joy Division and Big Black, but nothing yet had spoken to me the way "The Wait" did.
A few weeks later, I was in Chicago and one morning over coffee my host announced a new Killing Joke record was up on iTunes, and, being flush with disposable income that would later be pissed away, he bought it. The album was Hosannas From the Basement of Hell, and it was a fucking game changer.
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I spent so much of 2005-06 (and beyond) trying to get out of black metal, to find something else that felt like home to me. I found some solace in doom, in outsider rock, and in art punk, but nothing stuck the way Killing Joke did once the first few moments of "This Tribal Antidote" hit. It began a love affair spanning three decades that still burns brightly to this day. It’s also one of two Killing Joke records that I rarely see referenced when talking about the band’s albums after their transition from the softer side of Brighter than a Thousand Suns and Outside the Gate to the more industrial and aggressive atmospheres that would define the band’s post 80s output (the other being Democracy, which we’ll get to in a moment). Coming a few years after their second self-titled record announced their return after over five years off the scene with (arguably) their best record Hosannas From the Basement of Hell feels… different. While the 2003 self-titled album was bombastic and cavernous, Hosannas… feels stripped down to the bones, more acerbic and more off the rails. The production harkens back to their earliest days and there's even moments that feel like callbacks to moments from their mid 80s dance songs, albeit with a much more foreboding nature. This was also to be bassist Paul Raven's final performance as he died of a heart attack a year after its release and eventually spurred the original lineup to come back together to record Absolute Dissent, which I’m sure I’ll write about some day down the line.
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Democracy stands, to me, as Killing Joke's most underrated record by miles. Apparently the band doesn’t share my enthusiasm for this one, and neither do a fair amount of the music press. While I'm not one to tell a band how to feel about their own work, I do feel comfortable in telling the music press to suck an entire dick on a variety of issues, this now being one of them. Starting off with my favorite Killing Joke track from their 90s output, "Savage Freedom," the album just flows together from song to song confidently, with nary a hair out of place. Managing to make an eight-minute-long track in the middle of the record ("Aeon") not only not be a slog but a standout takes a precision in your craft that few of us will ever achieve.
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Years ago, I was aware that I was finishing my sentence managing the record store I was doing time at and so I was trying to pick up as many records as I needed before I was released back into society. My biggest regret was not grabbing one of the fucking five copies of Democracy we had laying around, thinking I could just scoop it up later. Giving Discogs a cursory look shows that 1.) they don’t have the black version listed, and B.) It’s excruciatingly expensive, same as Hosannas… (which I fortunately do have). I would hope that they eventually both get the reissue treatment that Pandemonium and the 2003 self-titled album have gotten recently but given the band’s feelings on at least one of them, who knows? These seem like perfect opportunities for someone out there like The Devil's Elixirs or even fucking Spinefarm, but at least, while someone is leaving money on the table, we have digital means to listen to them.
And that counts for something… I guess.
But Jef was right, it was "important," and Killing Joke would turn into one of the most important musical parts of my life because of it. And thinking about the important touchstones of the music in my life causes my mind to wander towards reading about them. Which is a perfect segue into the next time I talk at you for a few hundred words. See you then.
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