many tiny bleats: 2014

it’s amazing when you discover an album out of order. I don’t just mean out of order in the band’s discography, I mean out of order in how you know music. Every so often, hopefully on a Thursday, I’ll write about a late musical discovery that has left me refiling the cards in my brain’s catalogue.

KILLING JOKE

You’ll never listen to every record, read every book, or if your lucky, finish Lost. Seriously, just stop before the finale. That ongoing discovery is what’s both awesome and dismaying about life. Let’s say you had some JJ Abrams/HG Wells machine that in the course of ten years would enable you to actually learn everything there was to know in the world. Now I said ten years because if I said instantly, you’d discount this as complete nonsense; Ten years gave you pause. By the time you tell your idiot best friend that you know all there is to know, you’re already a liar. Things have happened. People have died, won awards, shaved mustaches. Your information is already old. Time happens in between what you thought was an instant.

In one of those ‘instant’s, which I’ll call 31 years, I somehow never heard of a band called Killing Joke. To be fair, this makes some sense. They made their first record two years before I was born, and then quit in 1996, when I was finishing up middle school. By this time I had traded my In Utero album to Rob Walsh for an Oasis CD (a dead Kurt Cobain was of no use to me and my sister Lori had just returned from London). I loved Nine Inch Nails, Faith No More, the Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Primus and Metallica. My older brother Jeff gave me a solid foundation in all things industrial, i.e. he dubbed me a cassette of Lassigue Bendthaus and Einstürzende Neubauten. I had physically worn out The Crow soundtrack. I just barely knew that Dead Souls was a cover of some important band, Joy Division, but had never actually heard the original. I hadn’t sniffed postpunk, new wave, or glam. Rock history was Led Zeppelin, The Doors and my dad’s doo-wop. I went to Radio 104 fest at Riverside amusement park in Agawam Massachusetts and saw MOBY play that’s when I reach for my revolver and thought it was a great song from a new band.

fast forward almost twenty years

About six months ago, I was listening to a Podcast at work. I think it was an episode of Nerdist with Chris Hardwick and Jonah Ray. They were interviewing Henry Rollins. Rollins can be somewhat elitist, but the man knows a thing or two about amazing music. He was talking about PiL and in the same breath he mentioned this band called Killing Joke. I’d heard the name sometime in high school and had some preconceived notion of what I thought the band must be without ever actually hearing their music. I have always had a tendency to make snap judgements about things, for better or worse. In high school I was crudely judgmental about music. I think I was so embarrassed for liking 311 that my path to redemption was to defiantly call any band that some poser liked, “shitty”. I therefore didn’t have to listen to that shitty music and could go on kicking ass and living the dream. Evidently some poser at Phoenix Records liked Killing Joke and I skipped them over. Or maybe I heard their name I lumped them in with bands like The Dead Kennedys and decided I didn’t need any more political punk in my diet. I had Skinny Puppy and ATR! Clearly, I wasn’t getting all of my food groups.

In college I grew a little more open-minded. I really got into the Beatles and Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd. Napster and file sharing took off and all of a sudden I could test out all kinds of music, essentially for free. I’d bookmarked ALL Music Guide’s web page (before Wikipedia) and would go on binges of “similar artist” listening sessions. I finally heard Joy Division, got into the whole Factory Records scene. Then I worked through Nirvana, Sonic Youth and K records. Ninja Tune, WARP, Mute, Matador, Ipecac, Nothing, 4AD. David Bowie, The Kinks, CAN, Eno, Velvet Underground, Black Sabbath. Music caught me in a tailspin. There was just so much out there, and from so many places.

After college I got into the Birthday Party and Nick Cave’s poetic cannibalism. I got into Wire, the Fall, Pop Group, Gang of Four, Bauhaus… I really would have expected to have listened to Killing Joke at about this time, but somehow they never showed up. Clearly they were an influence on The Horrors, Marilyn Manson, Jesus and Mary Chain, A Place to Bury Strangers, but nobody I knew had ever played their records.

Now, Spotify and similar streaming music services have made this discovery/rediscovery process easy again. I’ve never been much into singles and compilations. To truly know a song you have to know the album it lived on and the time it lived in. If a band can be summed up by a song, they’re a pretty shitty band. But an album can really tell you a story about a band at a certain time.

1980 - Killing Joke

The first time I heard Killing Joke I immediately thought of Godflesh.

Justin Broadrick has been inspiring. From Scorn to Godflesh to Jesu and everything in between he’s really a samurai in monstrously heavy sound collage.

When I put on Killing Joke’s S/T debut, I heard Requiem. a singular strobeing synth. jangly reverb soaked guitar. and then that voice. and 1980. There was a direct line to Godflesh’s Selfless (1994) and I felt like I knew nothing about anything. Killing Joke was the JJ Abrams/HG Wells machine in reverse. It ripped everything I thought I knew open and I had to start over. Where the hell does Ministry go now that I know this happened? But once you get past the fear of bewilderment, knowing nothing is a refreshing place to be.

There is a song called The Wait on this album. Early in my Killing Joke obsession my wife came home from work to The Wait booming. She knew it from Metallica’s Garage, Inc. - an album I neglected in my prejudice; if Load and Reload sucked (having not really ever listened to either fully through) then Metallica must now completely suck, ergo Garage, Inc. gets no listen. This could have been the moment, but no, not yet.

In 1996, when I finished middle school, Killing Joke went on hiatus, they didn’t actually quit. They’d reform in 2002 with a second self titled album featuring Dave Grohl on drums and produced by Andy Gill of Gang of Four. I recently watched a youtube interview where Jaz (Coleman, lead singer of Killing Joke) said that Grohl got on his knees and repented and then recorded the drums on the entire album for free. This repentance was for the, now, obvious rip off that Nirvana’s Come As You Are was of the Killing Joke song Eighties.