There are moments in life where a familiar song will catch you off guard because somebody's playing it in the last place you'd expect them to. Such as the time I went to the toilet at one of the black tie awards dinners the company I worked for put on in swanky West End hotels and found myself emptying my bladder to the sound of Godstar. Then there are moments where you'll hear a familiar song in a context that is so on the nose, so uncannily spot-on that one can't help but cast a nervous glance about oneself in fear of a reanimated Jeremy Beadle with camera crew in tow.
A few Christmases ago n0teeth was wandering around our hometown when we chanced upon a branch of Fopp we'd spent many hours and Saturday job wages in back in the day. We popped in to hear a familiar beat and guitar sample - Skinny Puppy?! On Boxing Day? Which three wise men have bestowed such a gift upon us?
We almost immediately clocked the culprit stacking CDs on the shelves: a goth-ish, probably first year of university type in a NIN t-shirt. I approached and began babbling at them about how I'd first heard The Greater Wrong Of The Right, my introduction to the band, in this very store nearly two decades ago. Rather than calling security to have this rambling oaf removed so they could continue doing their job in peace, they humoured my senescent waxing nostalgic and expressed delight that someone else liked the album they'd put on. (Androgynous goth-ish Fopp employee: if you're reading this I hope you're having a good day & are still scaring Cambridge's vinyl dads with your music selections when they come in to run their grubby fingers all over the latest Britpop autobiographies.)
"Has it really been 20 years since this album came out?", he asks, knowing perfectly well that it has been 20 years because that's what it says on Wikipedia. As I write this the windows of n0teeth HQ are reverberating to the sound of eNdgame, Skuppy's first album with fellow Vancouverites Front Line Assembly as Cyberaktif in over 30 years. The Puppies announced they were calling it a day not long before, but fans can take solace in knowing they'll continue to be making a noise in one form another.
I could never claim to be a diehard Skuppy fan, and I'm not sure the true heads especially rate The Greater Wrong... as a high point in their catalogue, but for me it will always hold a certain amount of significance. It wasn't just one of my first (if not THE first) introductions to industrial music, it was one of the first electronic albums I listened to from start to finish. And twenty years and infinite repetitive beats later I still feel that it holds up far too well production wise to be simply dismissed as Baby's First Electronic, a novelty goth-industrial outing to prepare Kerrang! kids for Aphex Twin (whom I admittedly discovered not long after).
It's certainly more replayable than any other Skuppy album due in part to the incredibly lush and densely textured production by Cevin Key. Ogre's vocals are pristine, almost clinically clear. And yet still unmistakably Nivek. The album is riddled with weirdly catchy moments, despite lacking the playful pop sensibility of Ohgr.
Notably, this was the first SP studio album since The Process and the death of Dwayne Goettel. Thinking back to that classic Jourgensen quip about doing his best work when there's a Republican in the White House, perhaps the Canadians were prompted to break their silence by the unfolding horrors of the Iraq War, which is alluded to rather more obliquely than the Puppy of old would have done, say, when bluntly reporting on the Iran-Iraq War.
Skinny Puppy was a name dropped by the intimidatingly cool goth a couple of years above me in school, if only to state her displeasure at how some band she liked (possibly Dir En Grey?) was starting to sound like them. I was still firmly in my metal phase at this point and would stubbornly remain there for another couple of years, but it wasn't just the guitars that caught my ear in I'mmortal. There were so many layers to it I couldn't stop listening to it on repeat, hoping to get to the bottom of this strange, dark & thrilling sonic mystery.
"Isn't this jingle bells?"", my best mate wondered aloud as we shared earphones on the bus and my discman neared the end of the track. I thought he was taking the piss, but on closer listening it turned out he wasn't wrong.
Pro-Test is really rather daft by comparison. And it's not because Ogre raps - hell, I'm sure you can dig out evidence of Nivek's ice hot flow from way back in the SP back catalogue. It's...because of the video I guess? Some goths showing breakdancers how it's done? Even as a militantly rockist 14/15 year old n0teeth thought it a ridiculous bit of alt-goth posturing. But I just can't bring myself to skip it: if you want to fully digest Skuppy's most polished record, you can't spit out the big club hit just because the sweetener is too concentrated.
Empte takes things back down to darker, weirder depths via an incongruously bouncy DnB route. Depths that I perhaps couldn't quite appreciate at the time, with my demands for the instant gratification of guitars, drums and hooks. This is where I must ask the million dollar question: is TGWOTR a good introduction to the Puppy back catalogue? You'd have to ask a true Puppy fan rather than a casual appreciator who happens to be obsessed with this one particular album. But my initial (and longest lasting) impression of Neuworld was of a political rally assembled by mutant frogmen on the surface of a grimy polluted pond, and having indulged in the rest of the Puppy discography over the years, that wasn't an inaccurate impression of the band as a whole.
Incidentally, re-listening to this album with Mrs. Teeth got us both singing the praises of everyone's favourite industrial musicians' (including cEvin's) industrial band, Portion Control, who opened for Skuppy on the UK leg of this album's tour. n0teeth owes the fans a lengthy screed about South London's finest some day soon, don't you worry.
Wayne Static, god rest his spiky 'do, contributes vocals to Use Less in a move that could only be seen as a cynical label-driven cash-in on nu-metal's success if you ignore the fact that nu-metal had already peaked three years earlier. n0teeth has no idea what sequence of events actually led to the Static Puppy collab but it provides one of the album's many instances of tuneful dirge, of tuneless parent-annoying racket wrapped around lush, carefully considered programming and instrumentation. Ironically, it's one of the least nu metal sounding tracks on the album.
God, that sleeve art was really quite spectacularly gross though wasn't it. Like a goreless Carcass, just worms, offal and surgical implements. And our dyslexic heroes cEvin and Nivek smushed up against the tray.
The final two tracks have always pleasingly bled into each other when I've listened to this album all the way through. The 48 minutes ends with a whole lot of barking and an abrupt "enough." from Ogre. By then your grip on time is somewhat scrambled.
There is a peculiar mood permeating every song on this album that I just can't pin down. It's not Ogre's outrage at everything that was happening in the world in 2004. It's not the palpable ache of loss that the surviving members of Skinny Puppy must have felt recording their first album without their bandmate and dear friend Dwayne since before he joined either.
It's a kind of psychedelic melancholy, a sense that the album is a semi-organic, semi-aware machine that is taking in the sights and sounds of the world in the early 21st century and not knowing quite what to make of it. You feed it hard data and it turns out gibberish. Or maybe I'm just projecting how my 15-year-old brain experienced reality onto a collage of funny computer noises assembled by a couple of Canadian blokes with their own individually silly ways of spelling Kevin.
Either way, The Greater Wrong Of The Right has earned its rightful place among my favourite albums of all time, by being completely unlike anything I'd ever heard before, and still being an enjoyable and engrossing listen 20 years on. I'm sorry if you read this far hoping I'd expand on the "pissing to Psychic TV in a posh hotel" anecdote.