Foetus

This isn’t the melody that lingers on

It’s the malady that milingers on

There’s the devil to pay, he can keep the change

I can’t stand the thought of another cold day

("Cold Day In Hell", J.G. Thirlwell)

The Australian James George Thirlwell, best known to most as Foetus, is an illustrious forerunner of contemporary shock tactics. Having emigrated to London at a very young age, a child of freak counterculture and a constant fixture of the London underground alongside the goth–punk of Birthday Party and the dark-industrial of Coil, Thirlwell understood right away how the musical trends of the period could be tossed into one huge cauldron in which to blend one genre after another. Over the course of his solo career, the Australian artist has made use of various pseudonyms, among them You've Got Foetus on Your Breath, Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel and Foetus Interruptus: on one hand there's a playful will to confuse listeners, but on the other there's an obvious statement that the stage name itself no longer really matters. Everyone has one, and that's precisely why its authenticity gets lost.

With the self-produced debut "Deaf", an epic dismayed by the trivialization of rock's stylistic tropes through a destructuring cacophony, the multi-instrumentalist borrows the satire of Devo and the Residents, thus giving rise to a homemade yet in some ways intuitive production. With the second album "Ache", the theoretical schemes of the previous work are set aside in favor of the eccentricity of post-punk, devouring its entire spiritual essence with dub-inflected mannerisms.

It's worth stressing the importance of this brief transitional period, since it will help Thirlwell build his decadent fable piece by piece. Recorded at Wave Studios in London and released in September 1984 on the Self Immolation label, in partnership with Some Bizzare – whose roster included names like The The, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode – the third studio album "Hole" shows a careful maturing of the proudly naif style of his earliest work. Explosive and compelling, the concept unpacks a series of taboos still very much debated today: war, rape, orgiastic rituals, shock, youthful bloodletting, anti-patriotic disgust, anarchy. Adding further shine to these ideas on paper is a heavy dose of Zappa-esque parodistic culture, veiled references to musique concrète (Stockhausen), and a slap in the face to classic rock'n'roll, knowingly vulgarized.

The opener "Clothes Hoist" warns the listener of the prevailing nihilism they'll have to submit to throughout the album. Between a very brief spoken intro, lyrics dripping with hidden sexual desire – "I like the way you fill out your clothes/ I wanna stick my hand under your hose" – and a rhythm as sudden as it is disturbingly unbridled, half indebted to the early work of America's Big Black, specifically the "Bulldozer" EP, the track gives voice to the wild nature of gesture, to the carnality of violence and to every beat that defines it: the sadistic guitars, at times fragmented by a sinuousness wholly born of the most chilling no wave to emerge from the cult compilation produced by the genius of Brian Eno (Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, Dna), condense into brief riffs that skillfully pit the aggression of post-hardcore against the dazzling fusion of industrial rock, of which Foetus can rightly be considered a Godfather with a capital G, on a par with James Brown and soul. And after a series of tribal sequences, the track welcomes the coldness of composition, embracing ever more the aura of seemingly sinister sonic decadence.

True industrial takes shape in the first cathartic twenty-four seconds of "Lust For Death", an overt parody of the garage rock hit "Lust For Life" that Iggy Pop released for his second solo album. Thirlwell's voice, unleashed with a blazing rockabilly passion, clearly reveals an unexpected vocal ability, in turn offset by an irresistible punk attitude that might recall the energetic creativity of the Gun Club's first LP, "Fire Of Love", though bolstered here by glacial synths that are, in their own way, conceptually close to the horror-film soundtracks of the 1980s in the style of Goblin. And it's precisely in the refrain that a balanced evolution of style emerges: the hammering piano with its vaudeville/cabaret verve, the drum machine absorbed in an unmatched crescendo, and the use of swirling effects merge into a circus-like, cartoonish atmosphere that's gloriously innovative in production terms — chaos that makes complete sense.

Drawing on vocal stretches straight out of the Suicide playbook and the raw edge typical of dark-punk, the track "I'll Meet You In Poland Baby" stands as one of the highest and most ambitious peaks of the whole record. Emerging from what feels more like a deliberately grotesque, comic-strip-style dialogue than a normal song lyric, we find ourselves facing a split between factions: the supposed good and evil – or neither of the two – try to strike a deal to put an end to their differences but, as happens with all the most shameful and unjustified wars, things spiral into the most uncontrolled dispute. It's no coincidence that Thirlwell dredges up a propaganda speech by Nazi general Rudolf W. R. Hess to underline the dramatic nature of the clash. The recording states: "thanks to its Führer, Germany will achieve its goal, to be a great homeland for all Germans in the world. Triumph and Victory!" Note: the version of the track on Spotify is inexplicably cut short compared to the ones released on LP and CD. The same goes for the album's closing track, "Cold Day In Hell". What happens next? It almost feels like slipping back into the measured rhythms of a metalworking factory, and then comes the cavernous "Hot Horse". In a savage, postmodern-tinged proto-hip-hop – something not even the best David Byrne managed to bring out at the end of the dance-punk track "Crosseyed And Painless" (Talking Heads) – you can hear the aggressive noise-making of Death Grips more than thirty years ahead of its time – the track makes plain the altered spectrum of its creator, chameleonic in building walls of sound as well as obsessive in his scornful arrangements and general uproar. Once again the meaty guitars are the absolute protagonists: they throw open the doors onto the long stairway down to Dante's inferno, down which one slides until rapidly collapsing into an endless vortex from which there's no escape.

The progressive industrial-blues-cabaret cadence of “Sick Man” needs to be heard for what it is: sheer madness comparable to the studies of Francis Bacon and to Lynchian grotesquerie. Loosely inspired by his friend and fellow countryman Nick Cave – he lives a life of luxury, he lives a life of misery/ the entries in his diary are the entries of sick man – and adopting a vocal style somewhere between a cavemanlike Don Van Vliet and a muddy Tom Waits, Thirlwell paints the miseries of a twisted man, left to himself and to the entries in his diary, yet exquisitely hedonistic in his sudden outbursts – gets in fights, stays up nights/ rends and mends companion’s tights – almost as if he couldn't do without the brawls that life keeps throwing his way.

Just as new wave conventions (keyboards, drum machines) dominate every element of the track, Thirlwell decides to “pull the plug,” flooding the listener with a river of chilling horror synth, its melody lifted wholesale from the theme of the Adam West “Batman” series. What sets the two apart, though, is a breathless crescendo fueled by a distant memory of rock'n'roll, which brings out the composer's psychotic side in what can be considered one of the most overwhelming, anachronistic and passionate finales in the history of rock. The track then dissolves into Thirlwell's heavy, tormented voice.

With “Satan Place,” paradoxically, Nirvana is reached. The song's protagonist, disillusioned and utterly demotivated by the excessive normality of everyday life, would rather take a one-way trip to hell, since it would make him feel more at ease. Satan becomes more of a pretext, a MacGuffin, to highlight the existence of a giant rollercoaster: human temptation. The lines “If I had a soul I’d go to heaven/ because I’ve been through living hell” are enough on their own to convey, in extreme synthesis, a monstrously contemporary state of mind: feeling trapped in an actual hell on earth, material and therefore fragile precisely because of that. The declared homage to Sixties surf music can be heard in the eccentric, unhinged refrain, wrapped in an attitude that's both faintly nostalgic and, in its sound, distinctly Eighties: the nod to the Trashmen's “Surfin' Bird” only reinforces the enormous musical legacy of “(Scraping) Foetus (Off The Wheel),” perhaps the first truly great project to firmly bind together the industrial of Throbbing Gristle, Zappaesque intelligentsia, the sound collage of Edgard Varèse and the freak-out avant-garde of Captain Beefheart.

In the anti-militarist track “White Knuckles,” whose intro is heavily influenced by the industrial-noise of Berlin's Einstürzende Neubauten, sharp criticism is leveled at war and its senselessness. This isn't just a human matter that, like all human matters, has a beginning and will also have an end, but a psychological fracture that strikes in the darkest moments of every individual, spilling over into visceral violence. The lines “I’ve gotten to the point where I believe everything I say/ I got a birthmark deathmask shaped like the Usa/ See me squirm with the sins of a nation/ See me run ‘round in circles of bitter frustration” shed light on the picture of a country growing ever greedier and more callous, unfit for human progress and for all the issues surrounding it.

With the closing track “Cold Day In Hell,” Thirlwell delivers one of his most ambitious compositions. Picture Joy Division's “Atmosphere” but with a bloodthirsty attitude, alternating with the best industrial rock of Swans' harrowing “Filth.” In its entirety the track takes on total desecration, boiling down to a roughly seven-minute cannon blast. The drum machine excels, the synths spin furiously around some hypothetical end of the world, declaimed by Thirlwell with a nonchalant post-punk swagger, and – broadly speaking – the very idea of an ending is settled through an icy, detached instrumental fade-out, followed shortly after by a typically no-wave guitar onslaught. Even three-quarters of the way through the finale, the freak-out invective still carries its own meaning.

With “Hole,” Foetus puts an end to a world built on certainties and lies. The improbable union of these two terms leads to a bloody satire, never before approached with such an approach and with courage to spare.

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18/04/2026