Velvet Acid Christ
Twisted Thought Generator
Metropolis
If you go to their web site, Velvet Acid Christ have all these Skinny Puppy pictures from their one-off European re-union; it’s a telling tribute. Y’see, these boys could very well be the next Skinny Puppy. Oh yes, they are that close. More on that later, though. For now, we have Twisted Thought Generator, the follow-up to Fun With Knives, an album that I claimed was their Pet Sounds. I’m fully prepared to continue the Brian Wilson riff. While Wilson was obsessed with Phil Spector and his pop whirlwinds, Acid Christ boy Disease Factory is clearly obsessed with Messrs. Ogre, Key and Goettel. The end result is the same, both creators are consumed by their obsessions, the obsessions haunt their every waking moment and deluding and driving them to greater and greater creative peaks. I’m trying to insinuate that, y’know, this Twisted Thought Generator is pretty fucking grand. In fact, if they would just divest themselves of the notion that goth folk and rivetheads actually like to dance to their music in social settings, and instead concentrate freely and fully on creating some prime organic/electronic weirdness, we could maybe have a revolution on our hands. Or at least a new Too Dark Park. In the meantime, though, we’ve got the problem of there being a few EBM-inspired clunkers on the record. The best part about CDs, though, is that you (or I) can pretend these tracks don’t even exist. I wonder if it hurts them to be so close to greatness? I know it hurts me to take in some of these songs – the ones that stake out their sonic territory real early on and loop it back and forth, like a good hip-hop riff would, and inside those boundaries they explore all the dark corners of the sound, layered over and over with dialogue snippets and PERFECTLY distorted vocals (fuzzed-out and chewed-up almost to the point of being melodic, and that’s NO contradiction). All hail the new mad geniuses and praise to their nervous breakdowns and drug psychoses.
Metropolis Records, PO Box 54907, Philadelphia, PA 19105, http://www.metropolis-records.com
