Skinny Puppy 'Mythmaker' album

SKINNY PUPPY--who remain the world’s most forward-thinking electronic/industrial-rock unit--enter their third decade with MYTHMAKER, their 13th album and second for SPV America, due out January 30, 2007. The group’s braintrust--OGRE and cEVIN KEY--have come up with a harrowing song cycle framed in dark, intriguing atmospheres that explore the concept of control and the manipulation of culture that falsely enhances the lives of the duplicitous.

Produced by Mark Walk and “the Scaremeister” at Key’s Los Angeles-based Subconcious studio, Mythmaker maintains the contemporary feel the band explored on 2004’s The Greater Wrong Of The Right, while retaining all of the sonic nuances that have become legendary in the Puppy realm. Ogre’s vocals—often sung through vocoders and ring modulators—work effectively as both public announcements to a diseased world (Blade Runner, anyone?), as well as the chilling voice inside the skull that houses a dangerous mind.

Key has split his considerable musical expertise between the realm of vintage analogue synthesizers and virtual gear, while installing all of Puppy’s signifying elements (soundbites, time-stretching and that trademark distorted-bass pulsing) for a power that remains positively resonant. Factor in contributions from longtime Skinny associates such as Ken “Hiwatt” Marshall, and new-school electro maniac Otto Von Schirach, and you have a disc that is just as engaging as such Puppy hallmarks as Too Dark Park and Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse.

Skinny Puppy’s art has never been something to be taken at face value, and careful attention to Ogre’s commentaries on Mythmaker will reveal an underlying sense of seething. The opening “magnifishit” (with the disturbing line “I am the maggot’s muscle/magnet missile/your mother’s pisshole”) is a send-up of alt-culture braggadocio intended to be demeaned. On the urgent “politikiL” the singer asks rhetorically, “Are you up for the suck?” effectively summarizing the deceit and half-truths fed to the legion of the media-pacified.

The simultaneous percolating and grinding “ugLi” (with its refrain “Jesus wants to be ugly”), is not an attack on spirituality, but a treatise on how religion is used as a tool by the morally bankrupt as a means of control. “I wrote those lyrics over a year ago, because I felt that the concept of Jesus was being used in an ugly fashion,” says the singer. “Now, you’re seeing a large body of the Christian movement questioning that utopian union and questioning the morality of the current administration.”

Mythmaker separates both the pretenders—and the resigned—from the sonic anthropology that has been Puppy’s stock in trade. The old adage of “art imitating life” is patently cliché; however, a closer inspection of the big picture guarantees that Skinny Puppy won’t be delivering love songs, party anthems or rock-radio miasma anytime soon. Hell, Ogre and Key are hardwired in a way that practically mandates them from following roads paved by others—or the ones they’ve built themselves.

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Skinny Puppy - Mythmaker