Killing Joke

The debut album by Killing Joke was a huge meteorite crashing down on the rock planet right in the middle of the new wave era. Its passage left behind a chasm, a lunar crater, a void that would only be filled many years later by bands of the caliber of Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. A tribal dance of alien origin performed in the darkness of the British sky.

The story of the killing joke begins in 1979; the band is made up of singer/organist Jaz Coleman, drummer Paul Ferguson, guitarist Geordie and bassist Martin Glover. Their sound is shaped above all by the schizophrenic avant-garage of Pere Ubu and the punk-funk of The Pop Group, but also by the decadent punk of Siouxsie And The Banshees. After releasing three singles that effectively anticipated their musical intentions, in 1980 the self-titled "Killing Joke" was released. Infernal atmospheres straight out of a Dantean circle of hell, seasoned with an unprecedented tribalism and sudden bursts of electronic distortion, are the recipe for an album that, from the cover art alone, already conveys a sense of anguish and dark tightrope-walking.

The opening is a grim farewell. "Requiem" kicks off the album by catapulting the listener into a funeral mass celebrated without pause, with continuous variations that always lead back to Ferguson's same malevolent stride. A wicked liturgy staged with ancestral grandiloquence; an "electroshock" performed alongside Coleman's malefic singing. Coughing fits and hastily rewound tapes open "Wardance", an even more effective demonstration of the band's impetuous drive: Coleman's voice takes on cybernetic, alien tones; equally robotic is Glover's continuously cycling bassline, while Ferguson's Afro-British-rooted percussion is the absolute engine of this war dance, which ends in a flurry of whip-cracks.

Listening to the following "Tomorrow's World" is like walking alongside Alex and his droogs, sharing in their most bizarre acts of malice; a killing joke indeed; a savage dadaism marks Coleman's vocals, pushed to the peak of his neurasthenia. "Bloodsports", on the other hand, is a hypothetical horror-training session, with the band chasing Geordie's incessant, repeated riff; a relentless gallop that spills over into choral ovations and slow electronic digressions.

"The Wait" is built around a pre-metal riff and forms the pulsating heart of the album, the swift synthesis of Coleman and the band's ideas. The following "Complications" steers the previous accelerations toward a steadier pace, without being any less violent for it. "$.0.36" is one of the true masterpieces of decadent rock as a whole: a chilling, radio-announcer-style voice conjures apocalyptic scenarios, before Geordie starts weaving another danse macabre, backed by Ferguson and Glover's cyclical scansion. Coleman is far away, screaming from the bottom of a chasm. "Primitive" closes the record with Ferguson once again playing dangerously, closely followed by the band endlessly repeating the same chords.

With this record, Coleman, Ferguson, Geordie and Glover unleashed a tribal, decadent new wave straight out of an apocalyptic scenario, forging their own primordial version of rock-industrial; the chaotic genesis of a sound that would go on to blend metallic din with the most extreme rock (Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, right through to bands like Korn and Deftones). Countless bands have drawn on the Killing Joke experience, especially on this record, often trying to cling to this runaway meteorite themselves, impossible to fully grasp in any single note or, rather, in any single shard of it.

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31/10/2006