Disco de Killing Joke: “Revelations”

This is not an easy album to get into. When it was released I initially dissmissed it but now, 20 years on, it is close to my favourite KJ offering. It is, in a word, BRUTAL. It pummels you from go to whoah with grating guitars, relentless bass lines, a wall of percussion and screeching synths. Vocally it is much stronger than Jaz's early expression and the lyrics are as brutal as the music.

Like other KILLING JOKE albums there is a similarity to all the songs on this CD but it is quite different to any other KJ record. High points are The Hum, Empire Song and Land of Milk and Honey but the rest of the tracks are all strong.

The darkest and most disturbing of their entirely abnormal catalogue, "Revelations" has the feel of a sinister seance that you want to escape from, and are hypnotized by at the same time. They have been quite forthcoming about their dabblings in occult sciences, and this album gives the sense that we were invited along for something few humans were intended to hear.

The opening cut, "The Hum" juxtaposes the security of a warm, cozy home with the hypnotic lure of a strange phenomenon outside, the 'hum' that is heard mysteriously emanating from some points in the earth (these guys are really into geomantics). Geordie's guitar SOUNDS like drugs - (and if you've never done any, here's the closest approximation in sound). Savagery abounds here, from the bloody revelry in "We Have Joy" (check out the 6/4 time signature) to the indescribably caustic and frightening "The Pandys are Coming". This is the soundtrack to the apocalypse of the atomic age - and I'm frightened and want to go home. "Chapter III" is a puzzlingly inspirational battle cry with a grandiose riff, and "Land Of Milk And Honey" is a frenzied tongue-in-cheek ode to the big-business music industry that became all too true for this great band in years to come. Closing side 2, as proof that we shouldn't take such a morose and frightening album too seriously, is "Dregs" which has Jaz singing scatty garbledygook over one of the most disturbingly jagged guitar licks ever to emanate from an amplifier. (I can just hear them laughing it up in the studio over this one - VERY FUNNY, GUYS!!)

Never a dull moment here.

this one sets the stage for fire dances by creating this enormous subdued tension - heavy, dissonant, less mainstream, more tribal than their previous work - but they hold it all in - a beautiful discomfort - then the release of fire dances

as far as i'm concerned, those are the only 2 that really matter