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New Patriarchy is soooo insanely good goddamn

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Horse figure of the day: Schleich Lana #82960

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Joyland

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✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

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1 day remaining to pick which cheesy alt guy eyecandy late20th century period piece horror flick you’d rather be clockwork oranged to watch 😇

No neutrality allowed. If you love both, you still have to pick. If you hate both, you still have to pick.

Brought about by a conversation where I admitted I’m not actually a big fan of either of these movies (the horror!) but which one I’d pick as a better movie if I HAD to. Not sharing my answer to limit any bias. Whether you love them or hate them, I’m just curious where others stand. 👀❓

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I have always loved Skinny Puppy’s “Last Rights” but I feel like this year has really been a year of returning to it and sitting with it and exploring it deeper than I ever have before and I’m quickly becoming convinced it’s one of their all-time best albums and also just one of the most masterfully composed albums of all time tbh.

It is just so cohesive and everything feels so neatly interwoven. From the cover with its sickly smoggy greens and yellows and oranges in this desolate surreal wasteland littered with skulls and gargoyles and angels and demons, crumbling pillars that almost evoke a burial ground of some ancient city or temple, and the NAMES of each song which all just feel so dark and surreal even before hearing them— Love in Vein, Killing Game, Knowhere?, Mirror Saw, Inquistion, Scrapyard, Riverz End, Lust Chance, Circustance, Download. I feel like it all feels very desolate and very dark and totally evocative of that same wasteland feel as the album cover. And that’s just the presentation, not even getting into the actual sound of the songs yet.

We semi-know what was going on when the album was written and what it’s about to some extent through interviews with Ogre; he was going through the very worst of his addiction, struggling with a bad breakup and a psychotic breakdown and it all sounds like all of those things were feeding into each other in a really vicious cycle. He was self harming on stage for this tour, he had a seizure in the recording studio at one point. 

“I was basically trapped in my apartment, only escaping to get more drugs to sustain the delusion that was going on. I was having massive amounts of hallucinations, there were lights coming out of the walls and I was under the impression that I was being watched by people very closely, and that there was a demonic force that was slowly closing in on me and just harassing me until I committed suicide, basically. It wouldn't leave me alone. I couldn't stop doing drugs because it was too painful to stop doing drugs and face what I'd become. And whenever I did drugs, as soon as I put the needle in my arm and injected the cocaine into my body, it was like turning on all the sound, all the vision, all of the hallucination...this was something very twisted and very real. And at the time I was being harassed by some people who knowledge with occupying different transient fields of energy, which I believe they did.” [source]

I feel like the progression of the album is just so striking. “Love in Vein” as an opening track, title itself evoking the moment of shooting up and the collapse begins. The opening “Dreams not waking,” capturing this imagery of the drugged out “main character” of the album there in squalor, shooting up to escape reality, wasting away. The album flows in and out of coherency and it’s mostly downwards from there. “Killing Game” is the most concious and lucid song on the album, which fades immediately to “Knowhere?” which is one of the most desolate, disturbing, heavy, chaotic songs I think I know of. It really sounds like the ambiance of a smoggy post apocalyptic wasteland full of half-functioning machinery, animal bones caught in oil spills and tar, exhaust fumes melting lungs, with Ogre’s screaming “One day you will have no one to run to.” 

The disorganized incoherent anger giving way to the much much more subdued “Mirror Saw” feels like the moment during a bad trip when you come back to semi-lucid semi-reality and are punched in the gut by self awareness. This moment where you ask yourself “What’s happened to me?” Or in the song’s case, “What’s become of me and you?” Most definitely thinking of the same person who was the target of the anger in “Knowhere?” The song is less coherent than previous ones—the descent downwards continues on even as emotions blur together and shift and evolve in and out of reality—but it feels like a moment attempting to break free from the altered state psychosis into something more conscious. But it’s too late for full lucidity. I picture “Mirror Saw” as one laying on the floor and staring up, looking at popcorn ceiling morphing into angels that morph into demons, noises playing from an old television just out of view so all you can hear is this chaotic cacophony of sounds, unable to fully parse what’s outside in the real world, what’s on the TV, and what’s in your head.

The themes of destruction of the home, the physical space itself, wrapped in metaphor surrounding the destruction of relationship and love and life itself—the dead baby crashing through the windows, the guilt crashing through the ceiling, the invasion of privacy and lack of safety one feels when exposed in the wake of destruction—is a prevalent theme throughout the album but especially in “Mirror Saw.” Alongside absolutely fucking masterful musical composition and mixing from cEvin, Dwayne, and Rave, inserting bits of angelic choral sounds that feel almost sinister in their ominous presence. Songs become more and more incoherent at the same time as Ogre’s vocals becoming less strong and less coherent. “Scrapyard” cutting in and out in these jagged discordant bits and pieces of noise without rhyme or reason. The album loses any sort of musical structure save for certain sound motifs echoing across various sonic landscapes as the album progresses further and further into madness.

“Circustance,” the last song before “Download” and the very last time we hear Ogre’s voice. The angel motifs and soft voices and sounds drifting about over the cacophony of discordant noise — the song is also incrediblyyyy erratic and lacks any linear structure — as Ogre sings “I looked upon the circus in the sky … Make it go away, make it go away,” the sort of transformation of the heavenly into something cartoonish and comical and fictitious, the irony of the circus jingles overlaid, the lyrics being purely bits and pieces of words and phrases, total incoherence as he witnesses this distorted Heaven up above him (more mentions of the ceiling, he’s still laying there in the rotting room, these are all still just visions). The song picks up in energy again and for a split second it feels like coherent (sludgy, droning) rhythm before it ends and we shift into “Download”…

…I think it was Dani who said that “Download” struck her for it being the final song and its complete absence of Ogre vocals, like he’s been fully overtaken or his voice has been lost. That really stuck with me. At risk of sounding corny “Download” sounds like an interpretation of dying. The discordant chaos and sound, the sounds of previous songs returning in distorted bits and pieces as distant motifs, the DMT release, electronic noise that’s incomprehensibly inhuman, life flashing before your eyes in fragments, the chaos increasing through the death throes, battling and resistance to hang on, until finally everything quiets down and turns to soft lulling whirs, breathing slowing, resistance subsiding, and the last 5 minutes of the song feels like floating, drifting away to calm nothing. And that’s how “Last Rights” ends.

I think you can interpret the album as almost happening in real-time, from The needle is warm at the point of shooting up to “I look upon the circus in the sky” as the final fractured thoughts before overdose/death, or just as an exploration of that point in Ogre’s life, perhaps as a sort of speculative piece on if he had succumbed to the intrusive suicidal ideation he described feeling at that point or if he had ended up dying to all the other inflictions at that point, be it overdose or a secondary symptom of the drug use (ex. the seizures, or even the frequent mentions he describes through the album of heart attack, head exploding, etc). Either way it just floors me listening through it all as a single piece how coherent it is, how dark it is, how much it all blends together into this genuinely disturbing piece of music that captures addiction and psychosis so well, the interwoven musical motifs and lyrical motifs and the constant imagery evoked of this totally desolate living space that’s crumbling both inside and out, haunted, plagued by angels and demons, the sort of Jacob’s Ladder sentimentality as the lines between the demonic and the angelic blur together, all both literally and metaphorically, where one can’t tell what’s really happening and what’s symbolic and what’s just a hallucination, how much of it is just spent through the eyes of the narrator staring up at a blank ceiling.

Like… goddamn. This is nowhere near a complete write-up but I just really wanted to get some of my thoughts out. It is such a harrowing piece of music and I actually feel like it’s somewhat underrated (although I know amongst Puppy people it’s beloved) in how beautifully crafted it is on all fronts. There is nothing else quite like it at all. 

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Heaven is a warehouse in LA with you

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Tbh I think this song is pretty underrated but it is just. The sound of pure undiluted Skinny Puppy at their absolute peak to me.

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Just got told I have this vibe kind of obsessed rn

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Obsessed rn

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Was tagged by @surgicalpen1sklinik to list my 9 current favorite albums ✨ Tough one to define but here goes… I guess gonna list 9 albums I’ve been spending tons of time with lately:

Talk About the Weather — Red Lorry Yellow Lorry (1985): Was recently reminded of the moment I had with these guys years ago when I was first diving deeper into post punk and I hadn’t really revisited them since. This album is just so good. Such an underrated goth classic.

Burning Bridges — Naked Eyes (1983): Another underrated classic, synthpop this time! Just such solid fun 80s pop, some huge hits on this album but some of the lesser known tracks are suuuuch gems.

The Wall — Pink Floyd (1979): After watching the film adaptation I’ve been kind of obsessed ngl. Whole album is fantastic (duh) but the last like 10 songs in particular just absolutely blow my mind honestly. I’ve had “In the Flesh” stuck in my head for like a week.

Technophelia — Geneva Jacuzzi (2016): After seeing her live recently I’ve just been so enamored by her, this album in particular is just so so so fantastic. A sound I’ve been missing honestly. I said it in the tags of a post recently but she’s giving such a perfect blend of Severed Heads Siouxsie Sioux realness, it’s to die for.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars — David Bowie (1972): The Wall had me thinking about other concept albums I’ve loved so I’ve also been revisiting this one; I had a massive Bowie phase in high school lol. It’s obviously a cold take to say this album is great but tbh I’ll confidently call “Moonage Daydream” one of my absolute favorite songs of all time. It’s so special to me.

The Correct Use of Soap — Magazine (1980): And speaking of favorites of all time, goddamn I love Magazine. I love all Magazine, but I’ve been vibing really hard with this album recently for whatever reason. Howard Devoto is one of my favorite lyricists of all time too.

RAT WARS — HEALTH (2023): Another band I saw recently that just destroyed me, they’ve put on such an insanely good live show both times I’ve seen them now so of course I’ve been listening through their most recent album (and more!) a bunch over the last couple of weeks.

Last Rights — Skinny Puppy (1992): And back to the concept album theme; is it a hot take to call Last Rights a concept album? To me it’s the greatest concept album of all time. I could write a novel on this one so I’ll just leave it at that. Love love love love love.

Idols — Indradevi (2018): It blows my fucking mind that Indradevi is so slept on. Genuinely abysmal that they only have FORTY-ONE monthly Spotify listeners. One of my all time favorite bands, Matthew Setzer’s Cambodian pop / drum and bass / dark electronic fusion side project. Please listen to Indradevi.

Obviously you don’t have to do this if you don’t want, but I’ll tag @lysistra @omegaversereloaded @captainspaulding @otisbdriftwood @euthaniized @blackchantilly @maldoror-est-mort @testure-1988 @ourladyofomega @theonlycure @baltowolfquest and anyone else who wants to do it! Tag me so I can see your list if you choose to!! :D

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Genuinely one of my favorite Facebook posts of all time

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To this day one of the most insane songs I know. Nobody does it like them.

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🌸 Kawaii Shop 🌸