Cop Shoot Cop - Symphonies of Paranoia

Spiritual children of no wave, which rocked the American underground around the end of the '70s with its ultra-nihilist ideology (think of bands like DNA and Teenage Jesus And The Jerks), Cop Shoot Cop (from here on: CSC) were without doubt the greatest exponents of industrial music in the final decade of the 20th century. Formed in 1987, they became an instant talking point for their guitar-less lineup and the sheer violence packed into their songs.

After a stint cutting their teeth in the alternative underground, the band debuted in 1989 with two EPs: the first under the name Headkick Facsimile and the second titled Piece Man. By then the band had settled into a five-piece: Todd Ashley (vocals and bass), James Coleman (samples), Jack Natz (bass), David Ouimet (samples), Phil Puleo (percussion).

After signing with Circuit, the time finally came for their first full-length test: it's 1990, and Consumer Revolt hits the shops, a devastating negative apologia for New York (and for humanity as a whole). Like a kind of "Modern Dance" for the '90s, the record wipes out in one stroke any accommodating view of the future of the animal rationale. "This ain't no place for ideals / This is no time for change", Ashley declares in a sinister voice at the start of "Lo.Com.Denom", the first foray into this terrifying infernal circle. Dissonant backdrops, metallic percussion and a cannibalistic intensity paint a monstrous fresco, splashed with a sinister mood yet hypnotic at the same time. Ashley is a kind of Nick Cave in captivity: every line of his is like spit on the mirror reflecting the grisly images of our time. His is the announcement of impending disaster. He has no interest in humankind's achievements, only in its bestiality, its wretched drift toward apocalypse.

"She's Like A Shot" is a love song carved out of ruined landscapes and faint traces of forgotten springtimes. "Waiting For The Punchline" is pain drilling through space, while all around flow radioactive gusts, noise-rock orgies and cadences straight out of an ultra-technological "Metropolis". A trembling glare distorts the backdrop, lending the percussion an atmospheric drive. "Disconnected 666" is pure avant-garde, in the vein of "Sentimental Journey". A voice obsessively repeats the number 6, while tones and phone messages of every kind converge to build a harrowing mini-symphony of technocratic paranoia. Next comes "Smash Retro", a rhythmic apocalypse that ends up collapsing in on itself.

"Burn Your Bridges" is psychic and bodily catharsis, the rustle of metal in the humid sun of a thousand pointless afternoons. "Burn Your Bridges" is digging into the soul, it's plunging into the chaos of collective revolt, an anarchic march and the perfection of submerged memories. Puleo's work on percussion is extraordinary: the solemnity of his drumming, dry and precise, sharpens the song's emotional force, staying composed and resolute even in its most chaotic moments. "Consume" is another foray into avant-garde territory: chamber music and jumbled voices that blur into one another, overlap, and get lost.

"Fire In The Hole" is built on an epic, hammering percussive bed — Puleo continues his monumental rhythmic work, but this time with an almost biblical march; tension is built through an accumulation of "concrete" fragments, particles of rage that periodically release sonic poison. From the increasingly furious voice of an Ashley now beyond control comes a desperate scream hailing the crusade against "muzak" ("...face the Muzak, face the Muzak..."): by this point, CSC's intent is crystal clear.

"Pity The Bastard" shows, if further proof were needed, the band's great ability to construct terrifying industrial "lieder", drawing on the work of the two basses and the percussion, perfectly in sync in outlining spaces of rare visionary power. The accumulation of cacophonous, disorganic sources pushes the listener to plunge into the vortex, to forget the standard song form and to identify with the looming disaster; all the while the music reveals its liberating force in a play of psychic projections, atonal implosions and elusive disasters of the mind. Fragments that nonetheless preserve the indestructible fury of the primordial flame, the union of gods and mortals.

A skeletal arpeggio opens "Down Come The Mickey", which delivers yet another relentless assault, before, without pause, "Hurt Me Baby" arrives, where voice and music are frighteningly deformed and exhausted, close to becoming one single, original hiss. "System Test" trots along noisily and without respite: like slaps on frozen cheeks, the samples reproduce disharmonically excited storms, automatic writing for screams scattered across dissolving valleys. A little girl's voice and a handful of piano notes are the prelude to the breathless rush of "Eggs For Ribs", a tumultuous farewell and the tragic endpoint of one of the greatest albums in rock history.

In essence, every track is a shard of an immense collage, a particle of an impressionist macrostructure that does nothing but repeat, in different guises, the same identical nihilist slogan, the same hallucinated vision of everyday life. And yet the metallic veil wrapped around every single note lets through, here and there, glimmers of a very peculiar urban romanticism.

From the industrial, dramatically concrete suites of the seminal Throbbing Gristle, to the chilling psychodramas of CSC, it's a short step. But what was still in embryo at the end of the '70s is today nothing less than a terrible shared destiny, even if, paradoxically, it coincides with a return to the most extreme individualism.

Consumer Revolt, the biggest attack on technocratic society, carries a frightening impact; but, after all, its message is destined to go unheeded; perhaps forever.

The album gets good reviews from the specialist press, even though, predictably, it sells little or nothing. No great loss: having moved to the British label Big Cat, the band once again shuts itself away in a Brooklyn studio to record White Noise (1991), a work much closer to noise-rock. The explosive charge of the previous record gives way to an anger that seems more contained, almost sly. The band is moving into more overtly musical territory, but without abandoning its original barricade-storming, hardline attitude in the process.

“Discount Rebellion”, in any case, opens in classic CSC style: a frantic, dissonant funk workout with Puleo's usual astonishing percussion and Ashley's usual unmistakable sung-scream. The tone is more relaxed on the following “Traytor/Martyr”, even if the sudden jolts and the metallic drive of the (dis)harmonic progressions hint at the fire burning beneath the surface.

“Coldest Day Of The Year” is built along lines of an irritating grandiosity, with relentless, impetuous rhythms. Then comes the frantically industrial blues of “Feel Good”, the battered, madly tribal dance of “Relief”, and the reminiscences of life amid a haunted forest that surface in “Empires Collapse”, with sound manipulations that would make the Residents of “Not Available” envious (albeit with an undercurrent of “industrial” sensibility). “Corporate Protopop” recalls the experiments of “Disconnected 666”, while “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose” sounds like a reworking of a Nick Cave track from the “From Her To Eternity” era, complete with Sonic Youth-style harmonic dissolutions. Slow guitar swells accompany the funereal incipit of “Chameleon Man”, another track in which the “progressive” technique of building tension is sublimated into an infernal game of explosions and implosions. “Where’s The Money” echoes “Corporate Protopop”, while “If Tomorrow Ever Comes” and “Hung Again” close the album in a fatalistic, apparently calm mood.

After this latest masterpiece, 1992 brings the EP Suck City, which follows in the wake of the previous record. It's necessarily a minor work, with all the limitations of a transitional release.

It will be Ask Questions Later, released the following year, that represents the perfect balance between the explosive industrial charge of Consumer Revolt and the relative accessibility of White Noise.

CSC discover melody, although in this ultra-layered maelstrom (where the influence of Foetus is undeniable) the melodic element, rather than being the load-bearing structure, ends up as just one musical “sign” among many, perfect for building extremely powerful, abrasive post-industrial sermons, but worthless if taken out of context. In essence, the New York band seems determined to leave melody-for-its-own-sake to the despised world of the most squalid “muzak”.

In terms of line-up, the album marks the official “arrival” of Jim “Cripple Jim” Filler on samples (replacing the departed James Coleman); also worth noting are the contributions of April Chung (violin), Jim Colarusso (trumpet) and Joe Ben Plummer (saxophone).

The corrosive indictment of American society in “Surprise, Surprise” hits the listener with raw violence. Ashley is furious; the rhythm section is nervy, prodigiously wound up. The dissonant trail that sets up the ending, and the blazing atmosphere, represent the climax of this blinding hatred, of this tormented journey through the rubble of modernity. “Room 429” is a sarcastic melody, distilled in a heavy mood of despair, of psychic terror. Counterbalancing the usual great rhythmic work are synthetic debris, scenographically arranged to provoke a highly emotional response.

“Nowhere” unleashes a repeated guitar riff, disintegrated by a monumental sonic collapse, and scarred again and again. “Migration”, a grandiose industrial fanfare, precedes “Cut To The Chase”, introduced by an epileptic bass riff and embellished by a mellotron that lurks obsessively in the background and a violin with a vaguely Arabic flavour: this interplay of opposing mirrors, these demonic reverberations, make it unquestionably one of their masterpieces. “$ 10 Bill” is a bizarre brass-band-style piece, punctuated by found percussion, whistles, screams, etc. The effect is less comic than atrociously fatalistic. “Seattle”, written by newcomer Filler, is a magnificent interlude built entirely around sampler work. Dedicated to the death of a friend of theirs, the solemnly paced “Furnace” is another of their terrible invectives, unleashed, as usual, in magmatic and delirious blends of percussion and artificial distortion.

Piercing chords and dissonant, dry, unhealthy trails sketch out the desolate landscape of “Israeli Dig”, wandering aimlessly through a restless, fragmentary, opaque space. “Cause And Effect” brings to mind the rhythmic pandemonium of Big Black, complete with metallic clangs and bestial death-rattles. “Got No Soul” is certainly the most atypical track on the record: Ashley's strangely subdued vocal pushes its way through big-band-style horns, assorted noises and a raving voice. Closer to conventional song form is “Everybody Loves You”, with peremptory guitar accelerations and a darkly grotesque atmosphere.

The sense of anguish becomes even more claustrophobic on “All The Clocks Are Broken”, a sonic vortex that swallows and spits out every other instrument at once, until it wears itself out, until silence.

Another great masterpiece, Ask Questions Later is less explosive than Consumer Revolt, even if, ultimately, it proves more varied in its songwriting, as well as better produced. Ideologically speaking, CSC's message is not one of hope, but rather a desperate cry against humanity's attempt to obscure the truth of its own time with aberrant, unworthy surrogates. As in the “wild land” of Jungerian memory, music then becomes an outpost from which to try to emerge unscathed from the moral and social catastrophes of the “time of extreme poverty” (Hölderlin). But before the fight can begin, one must resolve to become completely ill, giving up every pseudo-truth about the intimate essence of the world. For this reason, CSC offer no illusions, only faithful images of this existential carnage. The objectification of modernity is a necessary prelude to overcoming its most nihilistically extreme phase.

After this mighty trilogy, CSC can do nothing but continue down the path they've taken. So, in 1994 they release Release, which would turn out to be their swan song.

The album is without doubt the most “mainstream” – for want of a better word – of their career, with tracks like “Interference” edging, however timidly, closer to the alternative standards of the time. The addition of guitarist Steve McMullin to the line-up undoubtedly gives their sound new shades, but even so, few tracks are truly worthy of their past glories. Among those that are, we should certainly mention “Ambulance Song”, “Last Legs” and “It Only Hurts When I Breathe”, all of which come close to the apocalyptic scenarios of their earlier masterpieces.

CSC decided to disband, giving rise on one side to Firewater (whose "The Ponzi Scheme" shouldn't be underestimated) and to Red Expendables. James Coleman would later go on to form Here together with Mauro Teho Teardo.

Brilliant innovators of industrial music, close both to the uncompromising solemnity of Foetus and to the rhythmically feverish anarchy of Big Black, CSC wrote pages of unsettling expressive power about the psychological traumas of late-20th-century society. Their music echoes Russian Constructivism in the geometric tension with which the sound sources are blended together. Yet what stirs beneath the surface is a desolate scream of Munch-like memory.

"The 'wild land' is the space from which man can hope not only to wage the fight, but also to win it".

(Ernst Jünger)

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