Review Summary: A surprising sameness of style that I didn’t love at first, but grew on me.
Ohgr’s first four albums achieved something relatively rare in music: They produced a series of albums all beloved by their fanbase, each of which shares a recognizable “Ohgr-ish” style, yet each album also possesses a unique, individual character.
This description applies to Skinny Puppy as well. Cevin Key and the late Dwayne Goettel evidently shared Kevin Ogilvie’s (Ogre’s) resistance to record producers, who usually want music that sounds uniform, formulaic, predictable – “can’t you make it more commercial?” Over the years, this resistance to commercialization – coupled obviously with Puppy’s musicianship – paid off in spades for fans; the Sputnikmusic ratings-page for Skinny Puppy shows, if it can be taken at face value, that fans have collectively rated no Puppy album or EP lower than a “good.” How many bands on Sputnik who have a double-digit number of albums can say that? 50% of bands? 20%? 9%? I know they exist, but I bet they’re rare. (A list from Sputnik list would be an interesting read. Unless I’m wrong and it’s hundreds of bands).
Anyway, the crew of Skinny Puppy managed to achieve this because they have for years avoided the tendency of other bands to fall into a routine style of the kind found in highly successful acts like Testament and Sabaton. These are bands whose music I enjoy, but bands about which it cannot be said that they bring forth new albums each with a highly individualistic character. No, as one Sputnik user hilariously commented upon the release of a new Sabaton album, “on a scale of Sabaton to Sabaton, it’s a Sabaton.”
A distinct individualism held true in Ohgr’s catalogue until TrickS, their fifth album. For its character is stylistically very close to their first album, Welt. It does seem to contain SOME experimentation, but it’s not nearly as prominent as the vocal gymnastics on SunnyPsyOp, or the instrumental color on Devils In My Details, or the singular choruses on Undeveloped. Instead, it sounds very close in style to Welt.
As such, it’s an anomaly for a band that has produced anomalous albums on each successive release. Is that ironic?
THE VOCALS
First, some notes on the vocals. No one has contributed to the vocal styles found in electro-industrial music more than Nevik Ogre. In fact, I can only think of one vocal-style found in today’s industrial forms that Ogre DIDN’T pioneer: The death-metal voice found in industrial bands like Dawn of Ashes and Freakangel.
Ogre’s experiments in vocal effects and treatments started, of course, during his years in Skinny Puppy. But I think the full range of Ogre’s talent in this area is to be found on Ohgr’s SunnyPsyOp, their second release. The vocals range from the relatively tame alteration of processed and unprocessed on “HiLo,” familiar from various Skinny Puppy tracks, to more wild expressions like the robotic-echoes on “WaTergaTe,” or the frog-like croaks on “maJik,” or the delirious phantasmagoria of “SunBurn.”
Other tracks with this level of individuality can be found on the albums succeeding SunnyPsyOp – “eyecandy” from Devils and “pissage” from Undeveloped come to mind – but the vocal experiments seemed to slow down as time went on. Our album under discussion here, TrickS, doesn’t sound like it contains much that he hasn’t tried before. Oh, there are definitely some interesting vocal moments here and there on TrickS – the chorus on “Freaky” and the middle section of “Blowby” for example – but they’re subtle and you have to listen for them; most of the vocals are of the “routine-Ohgr” style found throughout all their albums. I don’t mean to use “routine” critically here; Ohgr’s music is always exceptional and TrickS is, ironically, no exception. I use “routine” because it sounds like Ogre just didn’t quite have as much fun playing around with the vocoder on TrickS as he did in past albums.
OVERALL SOUND AND HARMONY
And “Fun” is the overall feel of MOST of Ohgr’s work, TrickS included. There’s very little of the warped, nightmarish soundscapes of Last Rights to be found anywhere in Ohgr. TrickS still evinces the music the Sputnikmusic author of the band’s bio was inspired to describe as drawing “heavily from elements of electro-pop and metal,” and “incorporating…a lighter tone.”
Now, it’s on record that Mark Walk has worked with Nitzer Ebb, who worked with Alan Wilder of early Depeche Mode fame. So it’s probably not a coincidence that the Synthpop of the 80’s is almost ever-present in Mark Walk’s harmonies. Songs like “Subject” and “Muddle” sound like they share at least some of their harmony with New Order, Erasure and Depeche Mode. The title track, “Tricks,” though, has a sing-along chorus that’s almost diametrically opposed to anything to be found on a post-Bites era Puppy record. Forget the happiness of Synthpop; this is the joyous sappiness from modern music’s earliest ancestors, “Tutti Frutti,” say, or Buddy Holly’s “Everyday.”
Still, dark vibes are never far when Ogre is part of a project. The song after Tricks, “Due They Know,” starts out sort of fun and light like Tricks, but the harmony changes during the chorus at about 1:23 and transforms the vibe of the song ever so slightly to the sinister fun of the evil rubber-ducky on SunnyPsyOp’s cover, or the mad hilarity of watching a badly tripping Dr. Gonzo fail to navigate a merry-go-round during the Circus Circus scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In this somewhat happy, light, yet maniacal music Ogre and Walk are clearly a couple of artists stretching out and having a great time.
RHYTHM
In an interview along with Cevin Key in the June/July 2013 issue of Auxiliary Magazine, Ogre expressed his dislike for the kind of “boom-boom” industrial music you’re most likely to find in a dance club, and that was so prominent at the European Goth/Industrial festivals Ogre and Key were performing in during the early 2010’s, when Puppy’s Weapon was released. The quote is Ogre’s, but presumably Key and Goettel felt the same way, for they shied away from such blandness. They shied away from it even in the days when a rigidly-unvarying alternation of “bass-snare” – what I think of as a “classic industrial” beat – was a staple in the late 80’s and early 90’s industrial era. Then, when songs like KMFDM’s “Naïve,” Ministry’s “Land of Rape and Honey,” or NIN’s “Heresy” were establishing a genre, Skinny Puppy rarely ever joined in; there are examples of the beat’s use on the pre-Dwayne albums Bites and Remission, but I can probably count the songs when they used it after that on one hand. This attitude carried over into Ohgr and Walk-era Skinny Puppy, finding perhaps its most extreme expression in, again, Ohgr’s SunnyPsyOp. For in addition to its vocal diversity, that album also stands out to my ears – in Ohgr’s catalogue anyway – as the most experimental in the realm of percussion, with prominently complex beats on all the songs except “JaKO.”
And here TrickS is an anomaly – an anomaly, ironically again, in using a highly regular, predictable, classic industrial beat on the song “Lye” that ties up the album, and again in several songs clustered in the middle, cranked up to match Futurepop and Aggrotech tempos in “Blowby,” “Toxick,”, and “Mind Made God.” Common beats, yes, but I like Futurepop and Aggrotech, and these tracks are among my favorites on the album.
PRODUCTION
As I noted above, TrickS strikes me as the least experimental of their albums, for its style hews closely to Welt’s. This throw-back minimalism is possibly at least PARTIALLY the result of TrickS’ difficult production.
I obviously wasn’t part of the production, but I WAS a Pledgemusic supporter during production, and followed Mark Walk’s frequent updates. As I recall, these messages read like a mix of forced optimism with an undercurrent of frustration. They had to produce the album themselves, meaning they had to do all the work that is normally managed by a team of engineers and producers if they had opted to go through a record label. This is probably a tall order given the complex technical demands of creating high-quality electronic music, and must have required them to piss around with all kinds of tedious gizmo-fiddling. (Sheesh, I get annoyed when I have to change a password).
But then things got harder: The initial recording was corrupted in some way, and they had to bring in another engineer, and there were delays in its release. Never mind the financial disaster with Pledgemusic that followed (see Wikipedia for more on this outrageous and still unresolved bankruptcy case).
Anyway, with respect to the minimalism of TrickS, my point and speculation is that all of this took time and perseverance, A LOT of time and perseverance, time and energy that could have been spent on composition and what on earlier albums might have been finishing touches done in a more relaxed studio.
Given all this background, TrickS is an AMAZING achievement. The supposed “minimalism” I point to doesn’t affect its quality at all – I still value it a little more than Undeveloped. Only a nit-picky, obsessively critical a**hole like me could detect any differences from their previous work.
