Killing Joke - Funk-Punk from the Catacombs

Almost twenty years before the worldwide success of Nine Inch Nails, Killing Joke were born in England, the chief inspiration behind Trent Reznor's "apocalyptic dance". The band formed in 1979, featuring singer Jaz Coleman, drummer Paul Ferguson, guitarist Geordie and bassist Martin "Youth" Glover. Disciples of the neurotic art-rock of Pere Ubu, but also of the spectral dark-punk of Siouxsie and The Banshees, Killing Joke produced three explosive singles that thrust them into the spotlight of the British underground scene. "Are You Receiving" still bears the lingering influence of punk, while the obsessive "Requiem" and the robotic "Wardance" immediately reveal the distinctiveness of their sound. A post-industrial nightmare sound, built on distorted electronic textures, the mechanical cadence of the bass, and Coleman's screamed, anguished vocals. Funereal, desolate lyrics complete the picture.

Their debut album Killing Joke (1980) is the ultimate distillation of this style, poised between hard rock and new wave, punk and gothic-rock. Its violence stems from a fusion of hammering dance sounds, layers of pure industrial noise and metallic punk, shaken up by fierce tribal percussion and combined with simple melodies in the style of classic new wave. Standout tracks include the catacomb-like liturgy of "Tomorrow's World", with its slow, emphatic Siouxsie-esque pace, the tribal dance of "Bloodsport", the metallic frenzy of "The Wait (Malicious Damage)", the dissonant "Change" and the avant-garde "$.0.36". The album closes with the instrumental digression of "Primitive", built around a guitar-bass-drums trio that conjures an atmosphere of looming drama. Coleman conjures catastrophic scenarios, drawing on the science of the occult: "I don't believe in religion," he explained in 1981, "but I prefer to investigate natural causes, to study symbolism and the roots of the occult, which have been obscured by religious institutions. Killing Joke is just a state of mind: the awareness of what surrounds us".

The violent, metallic sounds of their early days gradually gave way to pop-dark songs with increasingly danceable rhythms, though still immersed in icy, depressive atmospheres. The second album, What's This For (1981), offers up a handful of distorted tracks built on electronic foundations and tribal beats. Among the most successful are "The Fall of Because", "Unspeakable" and "Follow the Leaders", examples of an original blend of funk and hardcore, electronics and dub. All of it steeped in a climate of impending apocalypse. An apocalypse that Coleman himself would go on to prophesy, heading off to await the "end of the world" in Iceland.

The following album, Revelations (1982), yielded their first hit single, "Empire Song", but didn't add much to their repertoire. After the record's release, bassist Youth left the band, replaced by Paul "Raven" Vincent. The result was the more accessible, melodic sound of Fire Dances (1983), with tracks like "Feast Of Blaze" and "Let's All Go", in which the hard edges were further softened.

Night Time completes the shift: the violence dissolves into a climate of melancholic sadness, influenced by the existentialism of dark bands like Joy Division and Cure. The dynamite-fuelled fury and deafening distortion of their early days give way to a decadent pop sound, tinged with dark omens. The single "Love Like Blood", one of the finest dark-songs ever written, becomes one of new wave's anthems and brings Killing Joke solid commercial success. The new direction continues with the sophisticated Brighter Than a Thousand Suns in 1986, produced by Chris Kimsey (Jesus And Mary Chain), which blends melodic pop with dreamlike, spectral atmospheres, delivering two tracks worthy of their golden years, "Sanity" and "Adorations".

Just when they seem on the verge of splitting up, Killing Joke find new life thanks to the arrival of drummer Martin Atkins (Pil). The line-up - now a quartet with Atkins, Coleman, Walker and Raven - recorded Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions in 1990. It's the drummer's forceful playing that defines the album, with striking tracks such as "Age Of Greed", "Money Is Not Our God" and "Inside The Termite Mound". Atkins brings with him the rhythmic chaos and sense of disorientation typical of Pil, heightening the drama already present in tracks like "Solitudine" and "Slipstream".

Coleman, meanwhile, teams up with Anne Dudley (Art Of Noise) for the world music album Songs From The Victorious City, enlisting a traditional Egyptian orchestra to join him. It's left to Atkins to take the reins of the band. Murder Inc (1992), without Coleman, attempts to update funk and hip-hop in a rock vein. The singer returns instead on Pandemonium (1994), an uneven album that can't decide between rarefied electronics in the vein of Tangerine Dream and Led Zeppelin-style hard rock.

Democracy (1996) does nothing but complete their downward arc, even if the title track occasionally flashes a glimmer of their golden years.

In the meantime, though, Coleman and co. have become the reference point for an entire generation of bands, from Nine Inch Nails to Ministry, by way of Deftones and Korn. Their "apocalyptic" style, born of a hybrid between American new wave (Pere Ubu) and British futurism (Throbbing Gristle, Ultravox), has infected not only the industrial scene but also dark-wave and noise-rock, proving to be one of the most influential formulas in the history of British rock. True bridge-builders from punk and new wave to modern rock, the creators of the "game that kills" have managed to claim from history what record sales (and at times the prejudices of certain critics) long denied them.

Back on the scene after seven years of silence, Coleman and company turn out Killing Joke 2003, a record wrapped in modern sonics but with an unmistakable Eighties backbone, likely to stir up old repressed nostalgia in fans of that decade. Andrew Gill's production (Gang Of Four and the very earliest Red Hot Chili Peppers) manages to deliver a bass-and-drums pairing (Raven, with a few touches from Youth, and Grohl on drums) worthy of Killing Joke at their most virulent. It hits hard from start to finish, with Jaz Coleman's unmistakable declamatory voice leading the charge.

A programmatic track like "Death And Resurrection Show", placed up front, unspools over seven spectacular minutes of frontal assault without missing a beat. Another, "Implant", stretches out into a terrified yet elegant heavy metal steeped in an unsettling, technological subtext redolent of old new wave flavours.

On tracks like "Total Invasion" it's certainly a pleasure to hear Jaz Coleman growling his cry of alarm, as menacing and desperate as in the old days. But those "programmed", martial riffs, which build that saturated, explosive wall of metal guitars arrayed in assault formation - how many times have we heard that done, and done better, by Ministry? Too many, I'd say, given that Al Jourgensen's own project has by now been spinning its wheels for far too many years, unable to truly reinvent itself. For Killing Joke, though, the story is different: their rage occasionally sublimates into devastating highs like "Asteroid", but the violence never quite manages to become truly destabilizing, and the songs remain stuck in place.

The real problem is that by now the students (Ministry, Nine Inch Nails) have surpassed the masters.

Hosannas From The Basements Of Hell (2006), however, is an unexpectedly vital showing.

Jaz Coleman and Geordie Walker turn out a sprawling, 62-minute collection of urban-warfare anthems the way only they know how.

Recorded in Prague with Mark Lusardi at the mixing desk, the album unfolds through long tracks that are, admittedly, not especially intricate or original. Jaz Coleman's roar is as merciless and desperate as ever, at once furious and annihilated in a primordial terror, and alongside Walker's scorching guitars and the possessed rhythm section, he redraws the coordinates of crossover as if it were nothing (the pounding, breakneck "Implosion") and launches into expressionist invective such as the surprising "Invocation", a gripping blur of images of war, violence and oppression. And if you really don't know who Killing Joke are, then get acquainted through lessons in metal-industrial history like the extraordinary title track, a devastatingly dramatic piece, or "Majestic", or that furious, headlong charge that is "Lightbringer", ten minutes at full gallop without missing a beat. Thrilling. Sounds we're admittedly sick to death of by now, it's true.

But Killing Joke spread the first insidious seeds of it well over a decade in advance, and today, after nearly thirty years of a hard-won career, they have every right to take the lectern once more and prove that they can still make this music better than legions of more or less youthful imitators. And while on one hand Jaz and Geordie flirt with nu-metal on the epic "Gratitude", showing a bit of hesitation in the process, on the other they can still turn out near-perfect classics like the opening, thrilling "This Tribal Antidote", yet another gem to add to their already inimitable catalogue.

Confirming a renewed vitality and an expressive urgency that borders on the miraculous, considering these marvellous hooligans of British rock have been around since 1979, Hosannas shows us a band still able to perfectly capture a world that, now as then, is sinking into fear and tension, violence and social, moral and political decay, and tells us that the deepest meaning of new wave is still alive and relevant, not just its surface sounds.

Twenty-eight years after the last rock cataclysm with a full line-up, orphaned of the much-missed Paul Raven – who passed away in 2007 and was admirably replaced by original bassist/producer Martin “Youth” Glover – Coleman and co. choose, as ever, dissent as the primary source of their inspiration for a grand-scale comeback summed up in the album Absolute Dissent.

The impact of the record is undoubtedly pleasant overall, especially given the wise stylistic alternation between tracks. Even so, the four seem to wallow a little too much in their own insurrection, though they do show a commendable will not to be embarrassed by the slow but inexorable passing of time. And yet the joke seems to have lost some of its lethal edge. It's no coincidence that the result is far more convincing in the few moments when the group seems to step away from the vandalistic primitivism ingrained in its musical DNA. So the frontal assaults – the title track itself, the raw “The Great Cull”, the restless “Fresh Fever From The Skies” and the devastating “This World Hell” – dust off that alienated catastrophism that has never died out in Coleman's soul, without however stinging all that much. The absence of truly incisive industrial arrangements, mystifying electric inserts and grandiose dub bass (with the exception of “Ghost Of Ladbroke Grove”) reveals, on one hand, a bold but harmless thrash composure, and on the other, a reduced punk instinctiveness, the result of a greater awareness of their own means.

The album feeds on the punk, metal and heavy debris already mentioned, delivering it with effective virulence, yet showing a worrying compositional monotony that not even due esteem, respect and mythologising can manage to overshadow, relegating Absolute Dissent to a dignified but flabby exercise in style for fans and nostalgics of heavy guitar.

Two years later came MMXI, proof of how Killing Joke have by now settled into a kind of timeless limbo. Building on what bands like Helmet did in the early Nineties, the English group brings to light a stylistic wasteland, in which the repetition of structures and vocals reveals a serious case of anonymity. Tracks like “In Cythera” (the first single) and the closing “On All Hallow’s Eve” particularly highlight the communicative ineffectiveness of a band that doesn't know how to balance raw metal violence with melodic elements without turning everything into something inconsistent and murky. Likewise, “Fema Camp”, “Corporate Elect” and “Trance” are pure monoliths of heavy rock tinged with thrash, opening and closing in on themselves through empty, repetitive riffs.

In 2015 Pylon closes the trilogy that began with “Absolute Dissent”, in a sense tying together the whole operation. Thanks to better quality songwriting, the album restores the distinctive traits of a band in good health once again, and also sums up thirty-five years of recording career.

Pylon succeeds where the two previous albums struggled, even though it adds nothing to what we already know about Coleman and co.

The coexistence between tracks with a more viscerally aggressive edge (“Dawn Of The Hive”, “I Am The Virus”) and those with a more twilight feel (“New Cold War”, “Euphoria”) is once again a reality, even if the average length of the individual tracks is often excessive.

A good example of this approach is also the opening “Autonomous Zone”, to all intents and purposes a true compendium of the band's signature style.

An enjoyable record, intense in places, with no grand pretensions, but a good reminder that the 'killing joke' still has a reason to exist.

Contributions by Alessandro Biancalana and Giuliano Delli Paoli (“Absolute Dissent”), Michele Guerrini (“MMXII”) and Paolo Ciro (“Pylon”).

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