KILLING JOKE

The early 1990s were a triumphant and chaotic period for KILLING JOKE. The influential band, fathers to a hundred punk, metal, alternative, new wave and goth bastard children, had disintegrated amid usurious record deals and nervous breakdowns. PUBLIC IMAGE LTD. drummer Martin Atkins arrived to see if he, along with band masterminds Jaz Coleman and Geordie, could resurrect the once-mighty band and rekindle its primal fire.

Longtime bassist Paul Raven returned, and the result was the incendiary Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions" — released on the otherwise-metal Noise International label, it was a sonic firestorm that shattered even the most open-minded fan's perception of what KILLING JOKE was all about. Bleak, apocalyptic, cathartic, full of Geordie's wall-of-noise hollow body guitar, ferocious beats like a dance club in hell, and growling bass, all surfed like a wave by the insane shaman vocals of Coleman, then at his venomous, disgusted best lyrically and vocally. The band's psychedelic, metallic crunge and insistent beats made for a combination that tangentially bounced off what NEUROSIS, MINISTRY, and even TOOL would become, without aping or overly foreshadowing any of them. The album was an underground smash, but the volatile personalities in the band wouldn't be tamed, and after some touring, the whole thing imploded once again.

Why talk so much about a seventeen-year-old album? Because new release "Inside Extremities" is nothing more than a companion piece to that record, from its ripped-off cover art to its very concept, one more likely to be found on a bootleg for obsessive completists than on the roster of a legitimate record label. In fact, you'd have to have a KILLING JOKE mania bordering on the crippling to sit through disc one from start to finish — instrumental rehearsal tracks, a self-proclaimed "hideous remix" of "Money Is Not Our God" which sounds thrown together in ten minutes, three different vocal takes of "Struggle"… you get the idea. It's the sort of disc that makes you appreciate how much it must suck to be a producer or engineer sometimes, and hear take after fucking take of a song until, no matter how much you love a band, you never want to hear them fart out another note again.

That high rating above, then, is delivered solely on the merits of the second disc — a blazing live show recording in France in 1991. Opening with the somber and moody "Inside the Termite Mound", and immediately hammering home a ferocious "Money Is Not Our God", KILLING JOKE prove why they've always been a live squad to be reckoned with, particularly when exorcising the years of pent-up frustration that made "Extremities" so… well… extreme. The guitars and bass are churning walls of quasi-melodic noise, almost a physical force, while Atkins batters away in the back (one news story at the time recounted a cut on the drummer's hand that lasted for weeks on this tour, because every time he'd play, he'd hit too hard and reopen the wound, unable to hold back). Coleman, of course, is his wild-eyed coming-down-the-mountain self, almost gently chiding the French audience for not being more prepared for the end of our civilization before cathartically screaming his way through that apocalypse's soundtrack. Even the band's earlier and more dance-friendly numbers are given a sawtooth edge by this lineup, and the results bring their discography to that date into a cohesive, frightening body of work.

So what's with disc one? I suppose a few basement-dwelling tweakers out there will rest easier knowing that not one scrap of leftover KILLING JOKE session tape has gone to waste. More than likely, though, I suspect that the packaging of "Inside Extremities" is meant to jazz up what will be, for most people, yet another in a lengthening string of KILLING JOKE live offerings. Buy it anyway — just because you own both discs, there's no law that says you have to give them equal time. And once you've heard this 1991 live set, there'll be no possible way you could.