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If I was making a compilation to introduce a friend to the work of Killing Joke, it's track listing would overlap with that of For Beginners by only three tracks, "Fun & Games", "The Wait" and "Night Time". Never before have I encountered such a willfully obscure selection masquerading as a perfect entry point to a band's back catalog.Caroline
Although compilers were possibly trying to avoid including tracks that appeared on the 1992 compilation Laugh? I Nearly Bought One!, which collected the band's UK singles, they could have used a title that better reflected the material included. The classic debut album, 1980's Killing Joke is represented by "Primitive" and "The Wait". I have a suspicion that the latter opens this collection due to the fact that it was covered by Metallica. While it is certainly a track worthy of inclusion, and one of the best on the 16 track compilation, Killing Joke does not need to use the Metallica reference as a way to gain new fans. By including stronger material, such as "Requiem", "Wardance", or "Complication" this early period would have been better represented. Had they included the excellent "Change", a UK single from 1980 (which was also included on the US version of Killing Joke), they could have drawn parallels with the "dance/punk" revival that is a current trend. What's THIS For...!, the band's 1981 second LP, is represented by a live version of "The Fall of Because" and "Butcher", a second-rate album track as compared with "Unspeakable" and "Follow the Leaders", also from that LP. It is baffling why no tracks from 1982's amazing live 10" "Ha" Killing Joke Live were chosen. That set was my introduction to the band in the late 1980's, and from the opening blast of "Pssyche" through to the end of the driving "Wardance" those six tracks of Killing Joke at their most energetic are still some of my favorites. The middle period of 1983-1985 is given better treatment here, with the inclusion of "Fun and Games", one of the best tracks on 1983's Fire Dances and the title track from 1985's Night Time. The reason why the same album's "Eighties", "Love Like Blood" and "Kings and Queens" are nowhere to be found is a mystery. The latter two tracks were each originally issued in the UK on two different 12" singles. It is hard to understand why tracks on which so much importance was placed do not qualify as recommended listening "for beginners". The compilation ends with two tracks each from 1986's Brighter than a Thousand Suns and 1988's Outside the Gate. The former was a mediocre version of past glories, and the latter, intended as a Jaz Coleman solo album, was only released under the Killing Joke name to fulfill contractual obligations. Skipping the inclusion of tracks from these two albums would have made room for some of the singles to be included. While For Beginners does introduce listeners to the band's sound, it does not include many examples of their best songwriting. I can only imagine what they might include on a compilation for "advanced listeners" (excerpts from The Courtauld Talks anyone?)
samples:
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With or without the visual context, Heresie is probably the least essential disc in Mute's reissue series, but is not without its share of interesting moments. Part one consists of seven studio tracks, most brief sketches, only three which could be described as songs. The emphasis is very much on the aesthetics of insanity, the band utilizing strategies of French playwright/madman Antonin Artaud. It was Artaud who created the concept of the Theater of Cruelty, in which actors hurl words at the audience, deliberately altering and twisting their voices to ratchet up the visceral intensity of the confrontational dialogue. Throughout this too-brief recording, Gavin and Guggi regress into infancy, uttering childlike phrases like idiot man-children, suddenly lapsing into inarticulate mumbling, or raising their voices to bone-chilling shrieks and stomach-churning growls. The record is framed by a pair of spoken-work sketches about someone named "Deirdre," whom the lunatic Prunes very much want to play with, it seems. "Rhetoric" is the centerpiece of part one, a seven-minute noise-rock maelstrom that bears an unmistakable resemblance to Looney Runes-era Current 93. Lupine howls and eardrum-piercing shrieks are pulled through an echo chamber as metronomic industrial rhythms and crunching noise guitar chug relentlessly forward. Just to enforce the pure insanity of it all, "Down the Memory Lane" follows closely on its heels, a wickedly brutal satire of Irish pub sing-a-longs, with the whole band adopting nasally voices for an inebriated paean to the "good ole days." Seeing as this is the only time the Prunes explicitly acknowledged their Irish heritage, it seems pretty clear they had nothing but contempt for everything that lay outside their Lypton Village bubble. Part two of Heresie is a live recording from a 1982 performance in Paris, a set of Prunes songs drawn from A New Form of Beauty and ...If I Die, I Die. Classic tracks like "Pagan Lovesong" and "Walls of Jericho" are given appropriately maniacal live renditions, the band falling all over one another in gales of perverse glee. It's less essential than the others, perhaps, but no less entertaining.
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