by T-Cube for chewbakka
Tonights’ Tuesday and I received another anonymous request from the infamous VKloake network, which seemingly marks next level of unwanted anxiety. Thankfully a black obsidian bullet wasn’t included. It went like this: WRITE A DIDGEST MUTHERFUCKO OF YR STPD DT REVEWS N FAST IF DONTWANNA BEAT THE SHITUP. The whole David Thrussell story goes deepy deep — those unnamed emails correlating with modest but helpful AUD donations send to an involuntarily assigned to me account started it. So what does it mean, in essence? I got my lunch money, the artist has a little piece of credible underground promo, you may have a sweet revelation, unless you’re of illuminatumni already. Well, let’s cut quickly through it, coz’ I’m due to bowl some Plutonium borscht at the Tractorhouse. It was in 1995 during half-hushed hardships of Chechen Crisis. Being a modest mouse in parade uniform, I was responsible for advertising quirky military pamphlets, deliriously patriotic and unashamedly effective. Totally covered-up by The Antiprop Ministry, of course. It should be noted that mysterious DT had been diluting waters for some good 7 years already. I was given a cassette replica of Black Lung’s debut release and that’s what I wrote 12 years later.
“David Thrussell is a genius. That’s a fact. I regard this man as a conossieur of all things surreal, political, sarcastic, futuristic, hermetic, erotic, masonic, anti-global, Hi-Tech Luddite, alien, etc, etc,etc… And he still looks like Michael Bolton! And he’s Australian! Now try to beat THAT!”.
I have no intention to refrain from these words. More:
“So… This is one of the most imaginative, unpredictable, dark, mind-manipulating, trance and fear-inducing, innovative (I can’t breathe…), magnifi… OK, that’s enough. «Prozac Parade» is simply the most sombre track in the world. «Theme from Black Lung 1,2» are Michael Nyman Vs. Not-So-Happy-Hardcore. «Somatime» feature drunken Maori chanting with crazy New Age synthesizer effects. There are static drones infiltrated with scary radio samples, dismal string pieces and absolutely mesmerizing 10 minute nightmare properly called «The Bilderberg Group» (which is really stunning — politically conscious ambient?!). And if that’s not enough — there is «Ridjeck Theme» which sounds like fucking «Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict» performed by Barrett, not Waters.”.
Now that was Black Lung, subtle and horrifying electronic project, much lauded by my dear totally neo-totalitarian colleagues. Later came two albums of nosebleed techno mixed with Hiroshima ambience – “The Depopulation Bomb” and “The More Confusion… The More Profit”. Another quotation:
“Such great hippy titles! They radiate WARMTH! I found them… I respect the amount of illness, sarcasm, nihilism and fury David put into these two monsters but they were actually a bit boring. A lot of distorted gabber stomp, a lot of steel grey analog hiss, some pieces which made me accept term “illbient” also. Plus references to the truly sick apocalyptic sci-fi story, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream… I knew that one well… But let’s move on!”.
Yeah, let’s. In my little redrum book there was a special place for 1997 opus “The Psychocivilised Society”. Here’s to you:
“Society…” works great in terms of diversity and dynamics. All the trademark Thrussell tricks are well measured, the pauses, the samples, everything is in the rig… I think you get me… This album introduced some of the beats and synth timbres BL really overused in the following years… I would describe the mood of this record as suffocating… Eviscerated… Oh my crooked vocabulary… But you know what?! The first track The Committee Of Guarantors is build around BEAUITFUL and extremely LONELY melody… Sustained by muscular beats… Then you have some classic surrealistic numbers… I swear the production is so crisp you wonder if all those bleeps and clicks live by themselves, reproducing in some tanker… in vacuum… By tracks 5,6 tension accumulates, tempo increases and… #7, “Rhic-Edom” features insisting bass-drum line with lounge samples… and then the fucking climax… Humint / Prema is a violent gabber marathon stuffed with slashing white-noise, piano, opera and orchestra samples, some live drum banging, pale angelic creatures whining… That Prema track is my favorite… It has a great intro… And the coda really breaks my heart…. It’s all done on the verge of idiocy but the coolness is regained… Then another two mid-tempo creepy rhythmic armadillos and we’re left with brilliantly desolate The Hive 1-2 ending. Yes, I like the Hives! It feels like you are lifted from some poisoned meadow into the endless black sky, brass clegs buzzing around you and then you see The Kaiser Chief in a miniature zeppelin and he grins, whispering through rotten teeth: 1916”.
“The Great Architect” of 99 was another grimy headtrip through entrails of quasimasonic soundtemples, with all the sacred IDM rules broken and deformed in the name of Techno-Dread. Though:
“Inert Stuff Drops for instance features a cute motive like smth. from the bright side of FSOL or Aphex… But overall the album is too spastic, arcane, insect-like…”.
“Profound And Sentimental Journey (EP)” can be described as profoundly morose, didactic ambient for pierced-nippled scholars of Major Arcana. A 2002 collaboration with Xingu Hill resulted in soundtrack to an obscure Italian cartoon about McCarthyist mice or whatever (I never heard it). And this is what I got in my humanskin moleskin for “The Sound Of Meat” mini album:
“It’s an EP? Surprise! I’ll tell you this — this music is about killing a lot of animals and eating them. Many of us still eat meat with great pleasure. But this music will make you feel sick even if you’re a vegan. I don’t know if it really includes actual slaughter-house samples but there goes something deeply disturbing inside the mix. Hellish stuff, mind you. The one piece of noise, which seemingly can change someone’s mind about the subject.”
“The Grand Chessboard” was upbeat but kinda puzzling:
“This one I don’t get at all. Dismal monotonous techno for Brzezinski readers… So they can dance, planning another geostrategic attack on us, poor Evil Empire offshoots… Given Russia’s weak and friendless condition, a point to which Brzezinski frequently returns, this album is difficult to digest… Uncle Joseph, why do they scare us? With their techno… The bears are dancing…”.
But the overcompensation came in 2005:
“Yo! Yo! Yo! Yo! Here goes The Atonement. David, thanks for NOT being dull at last! Some ethereal voice routine as an epigraph… 1.2.3.4. No-one expected psycho-surf mayhem from Black Lung… But here we got a collection of pretty vivacious hymens, promising spiritual decay, post-industrial collapse, dystopian isolation, oil wars Mad Max style, burning skyscrapers… What else? Hey! How ‘bout The Great Automobile Hunt? Are you ready? The beats are beefy, synth riffs catchy, production multilayered, the mood — angrrry… And I have a thing for violently stretched and pitched live drums samples… You got plenty of that in aforementioned Auto Hunt… Another highlight is The Doomed Fortress which is fucking fun! I just see those cyberpunk shitheads locked in this dirty fortress, dancing to Killing Joke, giving the finger to the Last Police representatives… Concrete Octopus is even more exicting (what a cool folk he’s got to be! Imagine yourself walking in the city park with a concrete octopus on a leash… Drunk and yelling obscenities! What? A metaphor for a megalopolis? Another one?!! No way, punk!). This is some weird and funky electro shit. Really reminds me of music for ancient arcade games like Pac-Man or bloody Space Invaders! Only in 3D! Cool!
Then back to some Maori-oriented battle technodrone.
8 is classic, classic Thrussell in his “nut professor” mode.
9. What is this? Prodigy Vs. Lustmord? This distorted groove, it… No! I can’t say it… It… IT KICKS SOME SERIOUS ASS!!!! Though permanently interrupted by “weird” sounds. Just try to come up with so many strange sounds after 35 years of eating kiwi naked, swimming in the ocean naked, running after girls in Savannah naked… No wonder David is such an angry noise assassin!
10. Some chanting from Enigma guys, some passable psycho-beats… Another upbeat track follows… And then “Megalopolis Dies”. But of course! Hair Police sirens roar, mad oscillators get heavy-mental, and the closer, The New Dark Age is absolutely stunning!!!! Better than everything you’ve heard before. Plus it’s got great hooks! BETTER THAN NEW KASABIAN!!!! You doubt it? Then check it out! You’ll be rewarded if you don’t lose your mind for good”.
Next Black Lung foray into the unknown was sponsored by Pentagon and had no budget restrains. “Full Spectrum Dominance” is a monolith of unfriendly buzziness and murderly illbience. As for the latest BL full-length, 2010 «The Soul Consumer», look here:
«Here he (Thrussell) regains his horroresque powers and breaks ahead into the evil fields of Gritdome with no aspirin. Wicked surf and pumped-up beats of bottomless pits, is pretty much where he belongs. That last number was hard enough to dislodge a soultooth».
I’ll spare you of full SNOG discography, but the ultimate Millenium masterpiece sure deserves an exquisite mention from the pension:
A bottle of fine… smth. Very very warm morning… And an angry reminder from David “WRITE! WRITE FAST! MOTHERFUCKER! WEATHER IS FINE!” I own him yet another review, OK. Dollars smell of amazing possibilities, anyway.
OK you think I’m just a drunken Russian gas-bag who can’t tell Neutral Milk Hotel’s album from Super Furry Animals’ EP… You’re right… But here’s an album which absolutely changed my life… After hearing this I went to hair-dressing saloon and lived there as a supertramp for the rest of my life… Well, I’d say it’s better than Dark Side on The Moon. I actually sold this CD for 500 roubles in 1999 because I was very poor and needed to take some girls to tequila bar! Yeah! I was rewarded with sexual healing, no shit!
You know it’s scary in a way when you’re so familiar with a record that every sound bites your inner nostrils like your ex’s perfume. Here’s the case… I don’t give a fuck about term “underrated” concerning music. In fact if you can get me outta this fucking planet in an egg-shaped space-ship I’ll be happy with just one record, this one!
Why not?
SNOG is much more acclaimed in industrial circles than Black Lung because they have hard crusty beats and a political message. But it stays like 456 floors above all the shit older guys with cool and WEIRD haircuts use to listen to. Ministry, Wumpscut, Front Line Assembly… Skinny Puppy? They’re allright, but still lame coz David can make better sounds with one finger than 12 of those H-freaks gathered together in their studio.
Why so? Because he’s been clean for all of his life!
Those old industrial wolves – they are a totally lucky bunch. Coz’ you can be a fucking 45 years old semi-junkie with rotting teeth and smelly ears but if you wear KMFDM t-shirt, red goatee and tight leather jeans you’re always accompanied by the hottest chick in this Goddamned environment! And some of them are DJs! Fucking DJs! Old fucking Goths! But looka at me, I’m even more depressing with my looks… Gotta buy a new pair of black fishnets and some fucking mascara…
So, back to the album. It’s a definitive, detailed, diverse report on the decline of Western civilization. Pretty banal by now but it was released the same year the last TRULY great book, Glamorama, was written, 1999. And I was lucky to buy it still hot from the conveyor line! It is a great record because… it has all the shit a great records shall have… For instance, great beats… Huge inventive beats which make Trent Reznor’s work sound like pre-school amateur parody of NIN shit! There are some melodies present! And Big Mac baiting artwork is stunning too.
When I only knew Black Lung project I wondered how the hell Thrussell’s voice may sound. It turned out he’s pretty close to Right Said Fred and that old guy with moustache from Yello. Which can be annoying in the beginning but then tolerable coz’ you know he’s just very open about it. Same goes for the lyrics. They’re simplistic but severed tongue is always somewhere in cheek.
I’m doing song by song trick now coz’ this way I’ll be paid MORE!
1. great melody, cool beats, righteous lyrics
2. great melody, cool beats, fat bass, melancholic piano lines
3. great melody, cool beats, funky riff, cool robo-vox, fucking epic crescendo!
4. great melody, cool beats, raving rabid vox
5. great melody, ultra-cool beats, great dismal lyrics, fucking amazing skipping CD and orchestra sounds
6. great melody, cool beats, funky chorus, robots are at it again, jamming hard
7. great breathy Spaghetty melody, walls of whirling desert dust, the abandoning of all hopes, cool female backing voice, great drum breaks, plus my Father rates this one!
8. cool twisted arrangement with painful slow-downs
9. up-tempo primitive guitars and some uplifting stadium trash
10. best bass line in the fucking Solar System, cool beats
11. cool retro UFO-cinema arrangement, out there segments with chirping apparatus samples and freaky vocoder, some totally crazy shit in the end
12. sinister James Bond jam with sitars in Soma project style. Ends with mind-melding voice sample and boiling sounds.
13. huge epic anthem of liberating from all the shit. You can picture castles gradually swallowed by the Great Flood of Fire. Not bad one for some hot candlelight sex! In slow motion! Goes on for ages, propelled by glorious Thereminvox sounds. Spoken word by DT is hilarious. Ends with lost take of Pink Floyd’s Time beginning!
14. This is simply the most desolate and heartbraking gabba/kraut jam about Earth with no human souls but machines only! Scary and so fucking beautiful I can’t even tell you! So fucking measured and accurately crafted… Windy eviscerating stuff…
15. Amazingly cynical sample collage
All of this plus a billion of nuances! Military approved joy! Buy one! Fuck off to space. Free!
Hell, that was laconic. In 2000s though my take on SNOG was harsher which is pretty evident by these wistful observation on “Snog vs. The Faecal Juggernaut of Mass Culture”:
OK OK OK OK
Computer, I’m a fanatic… If anyone, anyone here read my words before I explode I’ll tell you this… We, Russians, can type messages on Internet without touching the keyboard… Not everyone, of course, but those who have at least 10 albums with David Thrussell involved… Or 37 albums with Mike Patton involved… (Poo-Teen Domestic Device allowed this option).
So all you have to do is masturbate violently (there’s no insurance for your genitals) and think about the right subject the moment you come you got the review it’s that simple! What else? Me, I gotta tell you what I feel about SNOG. Let me begin the talk about his LONG AND HUGE legacy with this, his latest, shittiest release: The album art features a lot of shit. And trademarks in the shit… Helicopters police the scene… They listen to new Audioslave/RCHP CD’s…
When you hear it for the first time you are amazed. I’ve heard that all. Self-parody and the humor which betrays… betrays X-Rays… Not a song drew my mind to return… But I give David the wholesome 3 just for the Crash Crash song (Childish samples sound like Beck’s Scientololololo advisers idea though) und inclusion of some mp3 files… Acoustic numbers!!!!!!!!!! Some guitar and David’s voice…
You have to picture my red, wrinkled, sorry face… I went to the mirror, started to stare there… Crying: FUCK FUCK ЕBONEY В РОD БLAДЬ ДЭВИД КАКОГО ЖЕ РОZНА GOНДОUN ТЫ SRАНЫЙ НУ НИ ХOOЯ СЕБЕ, ЕBBАТЬ! ДА ЛАДНО ХOOIНЯ!
I WAS DEPRESSED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Besides I was going to the gym with my colleague, another senile overweight imbecile… And the rain went hardly on us… And then I heard the redeeming song in mp3 acoustic
THE STOMP SONG
It sounded brown but in a minute I was laughing. If you can tolerate this (Stomp Song by SNOG) then your chicken will be next.
PS : Sickopedia tells me that the band’s name is a reference to «kissing and cuddling,» which, according to Thrussell, symbolizes the Marxist concept of destroying barriers between people.
Yeah. I remember destroying a barrier between one peasant girl and I, by removing her knickers Marxist style. We woke up in the wet haystack, fully clothed, just teasing.”
2007 was a slightly better year, with ambiguous “The Last Days of Rome”:
“Weight reigns. Gravity appears even in dreams, in places where it should not work, our secret zones, territories unbound, fragile reflections of common, well known houses made of foam and spider-web… It brings us down this weight, this shadow of global distress, coz’ let’s face it it’s just as global as it is personal, this tension…
So many people around, laughter and lust and worthless communication of the third kind and secrets unfold, joy unshared, sorrow unglued, Ant Babel intact, The conspiracy is real and violence is even more real and we know it well coz’ it’s our only food provided by media. Media thrives on fear, expectation, broken hopes, sexual, financial, psychological inadequacy, addictions of every form and shape, endless human addictions and insecurities…
Some say the end is nigh and people have been talking about it since the dawn of Earth. Right? Right! Albert fucking Gore and one ugly stupid dummy named Gorby choke on ecological predictions but wait a minute… Why do those hypocrite politicians think they know something about climate change? Where are the fucking idealistic scientists? Where are the fucking idealistic anarchists? Everyone is looking for his Nobel, that’s what I say. Skin those humanitarians and you’ll get a wolf skeleton, a demon destroyer, an empty shell…
Brothers and sisters I’ve just started swimming in the new Pynchon novel, entitled “Against the Day”. And here’s what I think – this man of age 70 was a candidate for a fucking Nobel but that’s just a fucking joke! Pynchon is 23, 25 maybe. He’s forever young like young Mel Gibson. And bile-ridden capitalist critics are the hell spawn! This book is sure to explode my little, unpractical mind… Coz’ whatt do you know – Uncle Thomas is still on the people’s side. It’s right there with Herbert Wells, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, this book, a socialist utopia before communism and all the terror of ideology and technology…
Maybe now is the moment of great looking back trip. Like every little man I need my comfortable piece of truth. I hate Labia Bush of course but not as much as I hate Poo-Teen for he’s much closer and transparent, my own private gummy-bear of a president. And let’s face it – I hate and distrust every sleazy politician, every greasy banker, every rotten businessman. That’s plain envy, brothers. If I could grow dollar bills in my garden I wouldn’t even join ARMY, I would just hide under the mattress, I would kiss and lick the fucking pyramid eye on my gratuitous pieces of funny paper, praying for a Lucky Ringo Starr! I would lie in cold bath surrounded by pieces of torn rolling stone magazine, I would pull faces and scare 50 Cent’s poster with my invisible Uzi! Fuck! I love anarchy! That’s my true love, Anarchy baby!
So where it all brings me – to David “Beautiful Hair’ Thrussell of course. The man I trust infinitely, the man full of musical talent and verbal sarcasm. Just the Man, you know? Like Jonathan Swift of modern twisted electro or why not?!
This new album got me listening and thinking maybe too hard. Previous effort, brilliantly named ”Planet of shit” was plain shit. But here’s Dave is back to form. Let’s go track by track out of sheer excitement and pop-corn thrills and pop-art commercial appeal and yeah yeah yeah, Karen!
Musically it can’t beat “Third Mall” but some very pleasant surprises a-bound.
01. Love this song. It’s a song. About slaves probably. Great backing vocals. Oozing with ancient hurt.
02. The title number. Fucking glorious, menacing, proud three-note bass riff. String samples! A hit, certainly. Vocoder narrator talks about Sun exploding and decomposing living corpses in corporate glass towers. Very very good! Almost as good as Arcade Fire. (kidding)
03. A nice historic excursion. Here Dave just hints that humanity won’t survive this century at any rate. But… Like… Who cares, dude? There’ll be dinosaurs again! Cool! I bet Steven Spielberg will be the last man on Earth in his nano-bunker park. (By the way Kate Capshow was one attractive doll before Steven married Tom Cruise and all that shit)
04. Nothing special…
05. And here we get the twist. Dave goes all Dave Gahan on us. Without celebrated vibrato but you know… There will be tears. Life in the big city can be a bit sad, haven’t you fucking thought about it? Sad, sad, little life, but what about the city, it’s generosity to her only kids, the buildings. Her tears the lakes, her hair the parks, her veins the rivers, her eyes those lifeless neon sings promising warmth and happiness… We can’t reach that high, can we? Just imagine it’s all David Blaine dirty hand illusion and you’re there with Jay Lennon under his white grand-piano French-kissing with David Bowie or something. Gouge his glass eye away , I have no problem with that personally.
06. Again unexpected amusing electro number. Perfect in its own right. Mixes great with bus rides in my suburban elegiac district. I’m so fucking happy I don’t own a car. Who needs a car when you have a whole bus? A good wide bus with friendly ever smiling people inside? Pretty melancholic looking outta them windows on to ever growing buildings. My district, love it, South-West side, visit me someday.
07. Good warm properly tuned Vocoder. Is it soft or is it hard ware? Only Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman knows…
08. Well US gets a bit of spanking here. Ironic, you know… A bit wiser than Green Day. Really.
09. U2? Edge was in Australia and contributed some sky-heaven-holy-angels-we-feed-all-the-starving-no-prostitutes guitar. Interesting part when some modulation kicks in. I have no idea how musicians call it.
10. Nothing special again…
11. This song is a little bit ultra-violent in Hitchcock suspense style. Unbelievably disturbing. Frankly I thought Australia is heaven. Now I’m not so sure. I absolutely adore this gyrating low-frequency synth.
12. Is it from Bible or TS Eliot Anyway heart-ripping little ending.
13. Best track of the album.
14-17. Worthless karaoke shit.
18. Oh no, Dave! You’re not Vysotsky!”.
“Last of the Great Romantics” and “The Dissolving Satellite of Egoism Overturned” (both 2010) found Dave in faux-Johnny Cash mode which is maybe cute but not recommended by our still strong and willfull government. Better go for such stone-cold classic as “Buy Me… I’ll Change Your Life” from 1997 which has some hummable spaghetti dirges AND amazing uculelectro wiring. Or partake in another anti-fest of “Beyond the Valley of the Proles”, a sarcastically successful bonanza of beautifully orchestrated anthems.
Oh yeah and there are a couple of spoken-word, craftily packaged volumes:
“Musically this recording improves on “Voices of reason” faux-Muzak. It’s more abstract and wAY Too SiniSTEr… But… Is the message NIH-ILL-istick?!!! (I’m into cheap rap no-language phase) It is absolutely LAY DOWN COVER YOUR HEAD IN TERROR AND ENJOY ANNIHILATION nihilistic! Thus it is real fun!
03 a_town_called_desire and 05 the_writer follow familiar anti-consumerist path though background noise in the former gets frosty and fairy-taily and really fitting. But the real fear unfolds with the track 06. That’s some BLACK dream. Like one of Slothrop’s inner dreams… Scary shit. Powerful timing… Don’t think there are many people who can pronounce “F-f-f-f-f-f-u-u-u-c-k!!!!” in such a Draculian way…
Track 07 is amazing. “The Ears’ story lingers round white male fear of Asian Menace, of this stream of Will which can infiltrate your soul and then simply crash you. The story sounds alarmingly graphic… Falling bricks… “Ringtone” wasn’t very illuminating coz’ the twist in Poe’s original is something you SHOULD know from the childhood.
And then there’s Welcome which quickly picture thefinal slogan in your mind… and what follows this slogan sounds…. FUCKING SCARY! Really… Seems DT put some unworldly effort into this wave of Death Ray Electronics… It is followed by some satanic drill-sergeant instructing his sinner slaves to dig more shit in Hell… Oomph… It’s been a while, David! Now I feel you’re back on track. Will buy the book edition. Seems new Black Lung won’t sound like Black Eyed Peas… On the other (left) hand… Bring the 00000, Moby Dickens!”.
Well, that’s it for my humble attempt at a comprehensive DT discography and frankly 21 208 letters of which maybe 5% were written today is better than nothing so why don’t you jump the shark and call your fabulous bloodied dwarf for a feast of smiley broilers or maybe for a good-old Aussie brain-job?
