Issue #51: Skinny Puppy – Too Dark Park

Released:  October 30th, 1990

Recorded:  1990

Genre:  Electro-Industrial, Industrial

Record Label:  Nettwerk

Duration:  38:22

Producers:  Dave Ogilvie, cEvin Key

Personnel

Track Listing

Singles

Why Too Dark Park is One of My Favorites

As I was thumbing through my virtual record collection that I largely replaced most of my CDs with a few years ago, I landed on this cover and immediately got excited remembering how much I played this album (or most of it anyway) on my road to a better understanding of industrial in my youth.  Skinny Puppy will come up in any serious discussion about industrial, which led a lot of young people (like me) to their music after getting into groups like Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails.  The difficulty here is that while Puppy’s music is harsh and uncompromising, it’s also missing all of those “rock conventions” that we got used to in popular music.  Add to this the diversity of their albums, and these guys can be a tough act to get into even with all their glowing recommendations.

I landed on the album Too Dark Park via the track “Morpheus Laughing,” which I honestly can’t remember how I discovered.  “Morpheus Laughing” is still my favorite piece from the record, but I did gradually get into most of the others.  To be clear, this isn’t easy stuff to get into.  It isn’t really “catchy” or “danceable” in the conventional sense, and much of the time it can come off as chaotic and noisy, not to mention that Ogre is almost impossible to understand.  This is one of those records that has to be played loud and preferably with access to lyrics to be fully digested.  The good news is that at 38 minutes, Skinny Puppy has attempted to exercise some restraint when it comes to this barrage of noise.

Nivek has never been a good singer, which is part of the reason Skinny Puppy has never gained much mainstream attention.  To account for this, he usually does this sort of spoken word thing in most songs, maybe with the slightest semblance of a tune.  It’s like a broken chant or a poetry recital more than anything, even verging into rap on earlier releases.  It’s rhythmic, but it doesn’t have a tune, and that can make it tough to identify with these tracks like we normally would.

However, with a good set of headphones or a nice loud soundsystem, and no distractions, it’s amazing to “watch” the layers of this music unfold.  If one were to strip away everything but the drums in several of these tracks, it might even almost be hip-hop (“Shore Lined Poison,” “Tormentor,” and “Spasmolytic” come to mind).  All the clanks and buzzing can be disorienting at first, but they quickly give way to a driving, hypnotic soundscape.  There are guitars packed away in here somewhere, though buried and transmuted everywhere except perhaps “T.F.W.O.”  Eerie and otherworldly synths peek through tracks like “Rash Reflection,” “Morpheus Laughing,” and “Nature’s Revenge.”

Spacey synth bass pulsates through “Shore Lined Poison” and “Morpheus Laughing” while sweeping electronic string further the alien atmosphere in “Grave Wisdom” and “Reclamation.”  I once read a critique in which someone quibbed “Too Dark Park is a place in the future where robots and monsters dwell” and the image has always stuck with me.  The first three tracks, especially “Convulsion,” are the most noisy and chaotic of the bunch, seething with a mechanical fury.

If one were to listen to Too Dark Park again and again, very carefully, one might eventually pick up Ogre’s lyrics.  The problem is that listening to it over and over is a lot harder without knowing at least some of the words.  For a long time I was intrigued thinking about what might be happening behind all the fuzz and drum machines, and then one day I really sat down with the lyrics, surprised to find out that few of these tracks deal with anything all that interpersonal.  At least, I don’t think so.  The lyrics are bizarre and beautiful, and it’s a true shame that they’re so difficult to understand.  Most tracks are anything but straightforward; there’s a tragic and dark poetry in Ogre’s words.  For instance, take “phantom pinches waking from a dream / half eaten candy / from some disordered heaven / swirling tastes fornicate” from “Spasmolytic.”  I’ve got no clue what the hell this means, but there’s a dreamy, surreal imagery created that can’t be ignored.

In several cases, and with the help of song titles as clues, it is possible to glean some meaning from these, and many of them tend to confront environmental issues of all things.  Concepts like a post-nuclear earth, a dirty, used-up planet, and animal testing all come up in one way or another.  And assuming I’ve waded through the lyrics correctly, some even have political implications, speaking to the nature of modern day government and how it affects our perception of the world.

Too Dark Park is a thick and daunting listen, both musically and lyrically.  I’ll admit that my ears (or ear as it is) aren’t as used to this type of music as they (it) used to be, and I found it a little challenging to put into words what it was about the record that grabbed me so long ago.  When I queued it up for a listen, I even began wondering if I was too far removed from it nowadays to even include it in this series.  And then near the end of “Spasmolytic,” it started clicking with me again.  Maybe I’m not as close to Too Dark Park as I was 12 or so years ago, but I was still able to capture some of that magic, and how the incessant noise suddenly begins to form hypnotic grooves and how strange noises and Ogre’s unorthodox brand of singing melt into faint melodies.

Written by The Cubist

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