Killing Joke - Absolute Dissent (Album)
Killing Joke is a band that have rifled through so many incarnations and styles it’s hard to know where to place them in the musical integrity canon.
To call it metal would be a misnomer. For a start, the production lacks the gleam and unadulterated homogeny of a traditional ‘metal’ release, replacing it with a preference for cantankerous reverb and sludgy sound aesthetic more often associated with the industrial rock genre. Sounds like it was recorded in a factory.
In fact, this admittedly lo-fi production sounds like it has dictated the musical direction. With as much noise as there is bouncing around in that little box, a significant degree of sonic clarity is compromised. Power chords are in and the brutally simple bass and drums follows in lock step behind it the buzzing guitars. With the death of sometime-bassist Paul Raven, Killing Joke has returned to its very first incarnation, drummer Big Paul Ferguson, singer Jaz Coleman, guitarist Geordie Walker and bassist Youth Glover, and you can hear a first-band intensity to this lineup, whether in the screeching metallic stabs of This World is Hell or the full force blowout of Depthcharge.
The riffs here are often strong but Killing Joke have a propensity to absolutely pummel them into the ground with repetition with only the mediocre Fresh Fever From the Skies under four minutes. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; the better songs like Depthcharge and the chilly, keyboardy European Superstate feed off the grinding repetition. Other times, though, the aggro-verse-uplifting-chorus shtick gets old quickly such as on the opener Absolute Dissent.
Lyrically it's not always easy to follow what singer Jaz Coleman and the band is on about, but if you get right down to exactly what he is trying to explicate, its thoroughly intriguing stuff. Microwave towers in China, population control and reduction by nutrient deficiency and the coming of the apocalypse are a few of the lighter themes on the record. It is certainly terrifying, sometimes unlikely but always cogent.
At its heart, this is a violent and brutal record, not seeking to please anyone but itself. In this way its easy to see what Jaz Coleman meant when he mentioned that Killing Joke had its own spirit independent of the band. Like some kind of wild animal, viciously chasing its own tail, Absolute Dissent’s circular metallic attack sounds like nothing else but Killing Joke.
