Mythmaker by Skinny Puppy
Written by Mark Osborne
Published on 03/05/2007
Originally from Binary Culture / [the-lowdown.net]
http://www.binaryculture.net

I’ve been actively listening to industrial for about five years now, and there’s always been one enduring question; just what the fuck is industrial? Everyone seems to have their own personalized version of just what is and is not industrial, even breaking it down further into noise, industrial metal, industrial rock, EBM, and any number of other bizarre subgenres. While I think most of it is bullshit posturing meant to separate out what you like with what you don’t, it is important to note that there’s a few artists that will always be defined as being industrial, most notable among them Skinny Puppy.

Their latest album, Mythmaker, represents the most engaging and accessible music they’ve ever made while retaining the core of the Skinny Puppy sound, most notably OhGr’s rasping vocals through a variety of filters and the harsh yet technological feel to the music that has always made it feel somewhat dystopian and out of step with the time period that it was actually recorded. If, as Paul Pope suggests, dystopian fiction is our anxieties about the present projected onto the future, Mythmaker is very likely the future projecting its anxieties back at us.

Unlike OhGr’s Welt album, Mythmaker explodes into a multiplicity of directions that force you to take each song on its own merits instead of judging the album as a whole, making it a poor choice for a zone out and let the album play listening but is also a clear indication that Skinny Puppy are not resting on their laurels and are instead aggressively pursuing every opportunity that presents itself to them.

The obvious stand out track on the album is the Humble Brothers remix of Optimissed, that puts everything they do best on display, most notably their uncanny ability to build tension and suspense towards the moment where the truly throbbing bass instead of hurling you into an impenetrable wall of noise from the beginning of the track that many industrial acts (such as Combichrist) relish. For probably the best example of this technique, see Nine Inch Nails’ Just Like You Imagined in how it builds to a bigger crescendo until Trent’s dragged out scream teases the listener into the final crescendo torturously, giving the innuendo of the title its vindication.

The most notable of the new material on Mythmaker is far and away Politikil, earning both a standard and extended version on the album. Politikil is ostensibly OhGr’s ode to relationship drama, featuring a patronizingly singsong verse from him followed by some of the most shameless exploitation of his voice as either noise or techno like loops rather than vocals which results in the most nuanced and entertaining track on the album. Politikil unwinds itself and allows itself to be languid and somewhat operatic at times, but always builds back up to its throbbing insistence with whispered samples that suggest the build up of relationship drama through whispered rumours and innuendo.

Snapping at its heels is the surprisingly sedate and instrument driven Jaher that dares to eschew the aggressive throbbing aesthetic of much of the rest of the album for a more contemplative, melancholy sound. It draws the listener in much more than the rest of the album that plays out as more of a typical Skinny Puppy tour de force and is the most suggestive of the emotional turmoil that OhGr went through during the development of the album than the self assured conclusions that he drew from it that color other tracks such as Magnifishit or Politikil.

While the title of the album is meant to be a reflection of what OhGr believes is the human tendency to externalize and mythologize what they dislike about themselves, it also functions as an apt description of where the album falls in the band’s canon; solidifying it’s mythic status in the industrial genre for constant non linear evolution while preserving the musical and philosophical elements that make up the core of the Skinny Puppy sound and identity.

Anticlimactically, Mythmaker demands nothing less than five stars as it’s the only album that could steal my attention away from my steady diet of KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails, Zeromancer, and Mindless Self Indulgence long enough to score a landslide victory for the most listened to band of the week on my Last FM account, clocking in at 287 plays to Nine Inch Nails’ second place at 92 as of the writing of this review.