I think I’m going to go see Skinny Puppy this Saturday at House of Blues downtown. I have to admit I don’t think particularly highly of anything they’ve done since 2004, but their albums “Too Dark Park” and “Last Rights” are among my favorite records in the history of recorded music, particularly the former.
Sometimes, I think you have to be on heroin, miserable, and angry and scared as a wounded animal to do good work. It just sometimes works that way.
“Too Dark Park” is a concept album, taking its cue from the classic idea of the anthropomorphization of nature from literary antiquity. It’s a snapshot of a unsurvived night in a twisted, biologically perverse world (that of our own) in which Ogre (the band’s frontman) is beaten, bludgeoned, and tormented in fantastically cruel and wickedly brutal ways. A Lovecraftian Earth governed by an enraged Mother Nature, frustrated beyond the point of no return by humankind’s careless attitude toward her planet.
I think the concept is particularly apropos, given that apparently about half the nation is currently being gnawed to the bone by “temperatures 10 to 25 degrees below average”. (CNN) And there’s relatively little question that “climate change” plays at least some part in all the frigid goings on.
I, for one, am interested in witnessing just how bad things might get. I think we need to be slowed down a little, a purge of sorts. The advance of technology may not solve the things we think it does, and many of us believe that it often creates more problems than solutions.
In any case, I’d like to close tonight’s bedtime story with some lines from a promotional advert for “Too Dark Park”, penned by Ogre back in 1990:
“Within the tiny space afforded by myself, 'Too Dark Park' looms, as if beckroned, over a lost child madly scraping the Earth around it. Without the insight proven, before the earthy facts bore a hole straight through the living carcass shell, 'Too Dark Park' was lush, green, a veritable toyland of smoggy highs. Old Skin Beak now rules the park closed in by wicker brittle, dull, lifeless. Each season follows the next with the hope of rebellion. Rest assured there is plenty of room in 'Too Dark Park.'”
(I was pleasantly surprised to find such an inventive, fan-made video for the album’s lead-off track.)
-- ∆☩Y§ ☨♆∀☥✠
CVRRENT SOVND: “Convulsion” by Skinny Puppy from “Too Dark Park”