Cop Shoot Cop

Prologue

New York City, 1978. A horde of sonic thugs holds the Big Apple hostage. They call themselves Lydia Lunch, Contortions, Arto Lindsay & Dna, Mars. They're barely more than teenagers, charged with rage and terror. With their arsenal of howls, noise, dissonance and other atrocities, they lay waste to the eardrums of the crowds packing Soho's Artists Space. It's the American staging of "no future". Punk, yes, but hardly crude or primitive: because that iconoclastic fury also feeds on Albert Ayler's free jazz, on the highbrow minimalism of Glenn Branca and Philip Glass, on that avant-garde fever that had already inflamed the Velvet Underground's bacchanals eleven years earlier. A bestiary of lost souls that would go down in rock history under the name "no wave", immortalized by Brian Eno on the compilation "No New York".

The Day After

New York City, 1993. After the no wave breakthrough, legions of psychotic indie-rockers had put the States to fire and sword. It was above all Sonic Youth who wrote the soundtrack to alienation in the post-industrial metropolis, with their furious noise-rock maelstrom. But sealing the Day After of New York (and of the human race) will be a supergroup, bringing together four notorious criminals of the staff: Jack Natz (ex Undead) on vocals, Todd Ashley (ex Shithaus and Dig Dat Hole) on bass, Phil Puleo (ex Dig Dat Hole) on percussion and Jim Coleman on samples.

The scenario changes: in place of the alienated and violent, yet still living, metropolis, there is now a heap of rubble and radioactive waste. A garbage-dump city, dominated by machines that have wiped out humanity. This is the epilogue foretold by a generation of wavers, who had made fear of the technological future their own religion. New (and no) wave hands the baton to its most fearsome offshoot: industrial music, a chilling, sardonic portrayal of human ruin.

Formed six years earlier, Cop Shoot Cop had already caused a stir with their peculiar guitar-less line-up and the murderous violence of their lyrics. The nihilistic assault of "Consumer Revolt" took no prisoners. The follow-up, "White Noise", tried to steer toward more markedly noise-rock territory. Now, all that remains is to translate that original chaos into fully-realized sound. "Ask Questions Later" will see the mission through.

Anarchy in the Usa

Under the perverse influence of the Australian scene, and of apocalypse prophets like Foetus and Nick Cave, the masterpiece by Cop Shoot Cop distills a season of noise/industrial experimentation into a more "musical" sound. Credit also goes to the elaborate arrangements, which include a horn section led by David Ouimet's trombone, and to the notable advances in production (which will nonetheless make the inevitable purists of alternative rock turn up their noses). There are some new additions to the line-up too: Jim "Cripple Jim" Filler takes over on samples, while April Chung (violin), Jim Colarusso (trumpet) and Joe Ben Plummer (saxophone) also join the sessions.

The blueprint, however, doesn't change: the spastic percussion, the screams, the sarcasm all remain, but now, if anything, there are actual songs, and, on the whole, a more pronounced sense of melody than that of illustrious partners in (mis)adventure, from Ministry to Nine Inch Nails. Disfigured melodies, mind you, like that of the magnificent "Room 429", a tale of heroin and ruin driven by a relentless rhythm section. Melodies that grow ever darker, to the point of brushing against the desolate wastelands of British dark-punk in the danse macabre of "Everybody Loves You", with its jagged guitar jolts over sardonic lyrics ("Life is so much better when you're dead/ Conversation's easy when there's nothing to be said/ But it can get a little lonesome/ Maybe you should take along a friend"). And, true to gothic tradition (from Siouxsie to Pil), there's no shortage of Middle Eastern flourishes, conjured by the violin on "Cut To The Chase" over a majestic bed of mellotron.

Ashley's anarchic rhetoric tears apart what's left of American society in invectives bellowed at the top of his lungs, in the vein of the most Mephistophelian Jourgensen, as on the opener "Surprise Surprise", driven to breaking point by raging percussion and a devastating downpour of samples, or on the psychotic blues for trumpets and whistles of "$10 Bill", while amid the horns and clangs of "Got No Soul" you can glimpse the mocking sneer of the early Nick Cave.

The anguish grows immeasurably in the metallic labyrinths of "Cause And Effect", in the hall-of-mirrors sampler play of "Seattle", courtesy of Filler, and in the pandemonium of "Nowhere", where a relentless riff is pierced by continuous electric shocks. Almost breathless, we thus arrive at the farewell of "All The Clocks Are Broken": another unhealthy melody, then the black hole, the end of everything. The following ghost-track is just indistinct chatter from beyond the grave.

A record that is both shocking and mature, "Ask Questions Later" would become a fetish object of underground rock for the entire 1990s. But its malignant shadow would stretch over all the industrial music of the generations that followed too. And it will keep on haunting the nights of everyone who has heard it. Because fair warning: once you've heard it the first time, it never lets you go.

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26/03/2007