Killing Joke blasts politico-corpocratic-paedomaniacal miasma

Killing Joke’s eponymous comeback album is full of songs that reflect/pinpoint/despair over the turbulent, freedom-shrinking, deceitful and psychotic chaos we live in. Enter the world’s sonic chamber of reality to confront fierce, candid, relentlessly disturbing imagery to oppose all the hype of the tired, faked, clichés. ‘Killing Joke’ is massive, malevolent, aggro music, loaded with global topics and not self-centred issues of inability to be full-time slacker. This music can simply swallow The Deftones and Linkin Park together, for instance, as easy as a pretzel before proceeding to devour many more acts like a giant serpent from an ardent B-movie.

A grand shot of (reformed) legend came courtesy of Jane’s Addiction’s return to recording form a week ago but nothing matches this fury, this anger, this riff-rage! Dave Grohl’s drumming kicks the beats into another dimension to force the band to take even more brutally offensive position. A track such as ‘Implant’, with its marching-like thunder by Grohl (making amends for the past ‘indiscretion’?), booming bass and stirring vocal makes you wanna get up and erect barricades around the Music Tower because it’s been worse than ‘Emperor’ Blair’s Cabinet making records-by-dots!

The album is produced by the band’s contemporary art-rock agitist Andy Gill, of Gang Of Four, who’s studio-help amounted to fully respecting the material – i.e. being sonic statements: ‘The Death & Resurrection Show’, ‘Total Invasion’, ‘Dark Forces’, evoke images of rockets, chariots, crusades and Satan’s Oil circus, to start with. Chaos, decay, entropy, anti-WMD, that’s anti-Weapons of Mental Destruction. ‘Blood On Your Hands’ should start a revolution, overthrow humanity and unwrap a fresh tabula rasa. There is little room for romantism but ‘You’ll Never Get To Me’ gets near an emo-calibre song although its scope is as wide as a Marlboro country, a cross between a stoner and a hard pop-rocker. Ironically, but loosely, like Nirvana covering a Led Zepp track.

Killing Joke were reckoned to be “industrialized Black Sabbath” in the early days which could only be true if the whole factory had fallen on top of the Brummies! Joke were musically more akin to Public Image Ltd but its extreme faction, an avant-rock crossover that live came with Jaz sporting ‘warpaint’. The band is credited with influencing plethora of outfits, from Metallica and Soundgarden to Nirvana and Ministry although Rage Against The Machine must have listened to ‘Wardance’ once or two dozen times. (Kurt Cobain owned up to ‘Come As You Are’ being modelled on the KJ’s 1984 song ‘Eighties’.)

‘Killing Joke’ is primitive, tribal, ceremonial, purifying, enticing… It offers colossally fervent songs driven by monolithic drum-patterns, cosmic-size settings and melodies emerging over the gigantic chords to surge past all recognized frontiers. It is dark, the constant winds of dystopia blow through this soundtrack of doom but Killing Joke have always made it sound like a pleasurable experience. Just like life: a series of tragedies that occasional illusions of happiness bookend.

If music still had its alleged power to search and destroy, this would be its top Terminator! ‘Killing Joke’ lances cranial aneurysms – can you take its over-charged wallop of prime protestainment?

9/10
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Live dates - after V2003 Festival in August, a tour follows later in the year:

02 October – Civic, Wolverhampton
04 October – Garage, Glasgow
05 October – Cockpit, Leeds
06 October – University, Manchester
07 October – Rock City, Nottingham
10 October – Academy, Bristol
11 October – Astoria, London