Heralding another spurt of activity, this legendary duo has reissued a pair of two long out of print albums from the late 1990s with two added discs of unreleased material. I’ve always found the two previously released albums, When Pornography is No Longer Enough and The Victim as Beauty, amongst the most unhinged and violent power electronics recordings ever, and they’ve lost none of their De Sadeian intensity since release.
Originally the solo project of Kevin Tomkins in the early 1980s, he first shelved the SJ name after joining Whitehouse, but later returned to it with Paul Taylor in the mid 1990s with the guitar-heavy Death Mask.A few years later When Pornography is No Longer Enough appeared on the short lived Death Factory side-label of Cold Meat Industries.
The core of this box is a pair of concept albums, based around the life and crimes of fictional murderer Hyndo Carney.I've always had my reservations about noise/power electronics and the whole "misogynistic serial killer" theme, but SJ does it so well that it's hard to criticize.It was at this point that the identifiable guitars from Death Mask disappeared, replaced with inconsistent, acidic blasts of noise that sounds like no one else.Coupled with Tomkins' completely unhinged vocals, there is a level of mania that hardly anything can match.
At the same time as this album was recorded, Tomkins and Taylor were also working on the final Bodychoke album, Cold River Songs, which was, ironically, their most accessible work.While the sonic approach between the two albums may have been completely different, some overlap can be heard: "Third Victim: With Control: Message to Your Mother" shares many lyrics with that album's opener "Control", but here amped up to even greater levels of disgusting brutality.Even though most of the album is spastic outbursts of vocals and jarring white noise, the title track instead has a carefully composed structure, building a hellish blast from rudimentary sounds.As a whole the album never relents, save for a dark ambient outro to "Seventh Victim", which still leaves on a painful note.
The second album, The Victim as Beauty, covers similar ground, but is more conceptually structured, mimicking a traditional narrative.While the harsh pieces are in a similar vein to Pornography, there is more of a cinematic atmosphere, with the more violent moments tempered with pensive, ambient passages that give some relief, but the tension never relents.
The harsher noise pieces are very similar to the previous album, but also show that SJ couldn't push this level of intensity any further.For example, Tomkins' "Come on, cunt…show me your fucking titties!" line almost pushes the album into self-parody on opener "Act One: Abduction"
It almost seems as if Tomkins and Taylor figured this out early on, because the album develops an identity of its own afterward.The second "scene," "Act I:Fear and Anticipation," is a repetitive loop of what sounds like organ music allowing only the most subtle of variations, creating a vintage horror flick ambient tension that threatens to attack at any given time. The noise pieces, like "Humiliation"display the same harsh vibes as Pornography, but it comes across as more structured, less manic in comparison.Ending "Cold Aftermath" is a simple expanse of droning synth, with clattering distant percussive outbursts.
Disc three is unreleased material from The Victim as Beauty sessions, different experiments in sound that vary greatly from the harsh moments of that album but also herald some of the more recent SJ output, as well as Tomkins’ solo work."Realisation" and "First Blood," for example, are heavily processed loop-centric works that inhabit that purgatory between noise and ambience, a place that SJ threw themselves into with This Is The Truth.
It's only "White Light Power" that feels like the band's traditional noise, and with its overdriven, but sustained passages of mangled sound, it could almost be an early SJ work that never saw the light of day.Overall the pieces on the disc do reinforce the cinematic concept of The Victim as Beauty, and would probably have strengthened that album even more:the shrill scrapes of "Final Victim" and the cold electronic dissonance of "Post" could easily pass for film score material.
The fourth disc includes the previously released XI 7" single, which has a substantially difference sound than what proceeded it, such as the collaged restraint of "V," even with its noise outbursts, and the old fashioned power electronics squall of "VI."Also included are two tracks that were considered for single release, but abandoned."Drowning in the Glorious Bloody Filth" encroaches surprisingly into musical territory, with overdriven synth loops and Tomkins' actually singing (and sounding very Genesis P-Orridge like).Its counterpart is "Cunt Down (Eyes Please Mother)" with its unrelenting white noise ambience comes across as a precursor to the whole "harsh noise walls" scene.
When Sutcliffe Jugend began to reinvent their sound in the mid 2000s, it was a necessary evolution.The whole harsh noise/power electronics aggression hit a zenith which would be nearly impossible to reach again:sound and music doesn't get more violent than this.Even over a decade since they first appeared, these albums are still unmatched, and the supplemental material included gives a new insight into both these albums and the band.Disturbing, ugly and unpleasant are fair adjectives for this violent material, which is what makes it so brilliant, and a cursory listen shows just how much influence these albums have had:I doubt Prurient would be around had these guys not done their thing first.
samples:
- First Victim: With Knife: Left to Die with Many Cuts
- First Blood
- Drowning in the Glorious Bloody Filth
 
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