Currently enjoying “The Process” by Skinny Puppy

I didn’t make the time to do one of these posts last week, and it was mainly because I was already working on my first two reviews for Chart. There’s much more to come on that front in the near future – including an upcoming piece that I’m really excited about – but that doesn’t mean I want to stop writing about music here. It just means that instead of writing about new music, I’ll be more likely to focus on older favourites like The Process.

The musical legacy of Skinny Puppy is essentially secure. As Canada’s first and foremost industrial group, not to mention one of the acts that played a pivotal role in launching the now-massive Nettwerk label in the mid-eighties, their impact as a band can’t be denied. But the period in the mid-nineties that eventually resulted in The Process was an almost epically low point for the band, and for several years it looked like the bitter end.

It’s an understatement to say that The Process, intended as a concept album about a controversial religious sect of the same name that vocalist Nivek Ogre had been introduced to by Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, was a difficult album to make. In the unusually long time it took to record, it bounced from one producer to another. It was also the group’s first album for American Recordings, a label well aware of how many albums Nine Inch Nails was selling at the time.

After failing miserably to convince Skinny Puppy to record their own version of The Downward Spiral, the label dropped the band in 1995. Ogre left the band, essentially dissolving it, and keyboardist Dwayne Goettel died shortly afterwards of a heroin overdose at his family’s home in Edmonton, where he had been staying in the hope of kicking his habit.

Incidentally, Trent Reznor himself has said that “Down In It,” his first single, was essentially “a total rip-off” of Skinny Puppy’s 1986 single “Dig It.” So you can count that as one more example of the group’s influence.

By the time The Process finally saw the light of day in 1996, it was pushed as Skinny Puppy’s final album. The liner notes featured the words “The End,” along with a dedication to Goettel. It wasn’t until Ogre and fellow founding member cEvin Key reunited at the Doomsday Festival in 2000, and released The Greater Wrong of the Right in 2004, that the rumours of the group’s death were finally proven to be greatly exaggerated.

I came to Skinny Puppy late in the game. I was one of the many suburban teenagers in army surplus jackets who got into industrial music through Nine Inch Nails – along with groups like Front Line Assembly (a group founded by former Puppy member Bill Leeb), KMFDM (a group that paid an excellent tribute to Skinny Puppy on the Remix Dys Temper compilation) and Ministry (who arguably led the group down its worst detour). By the time I finally did the appropriate digging – during that awesome age when the web was basically nothing but a frontier of crude fan pages created by nerdy university students who couldn’t think of anything better to do with their free megabyte – Skinny Puppy had dissolved and The Process was the album that critics and fans were talking about.

Many of the people who got into the band much earlier than I did – and to be fair, the fourteen years ago that I got into them doesn’t exactly count as “recently” – will tell you that The Process doesn’t really measure up to the band’s earlier material. And when it comes to a band that went out of its way to adopt to a new and arguably more difficult sound with each passing album, that’s strictly a judgment call. Personally, I went on to love their first EP, enjoy the bulk of what followed, and pay no mind to a few of their more unsuccessful experiments.

As for The Process itself – which I now realize I’ve managed to get to a ninth paragraph without directly reviewing – it’s a great album from start to finish. In fact, it’s one of my favourite albums ever. Music lovers everywhere have their own shortlist of game-changing discs that don’t sound like anything they’ve ever heard before, and it’s admittedly a little bit tougher to review that sort of album objectivity. There aren’t many albums that I can clearly remember hearing for the first time – Apocalypse ’91 by Public Enemy, Countdown to Extinction by Megadeth, and the previously mentioned Ministry’s Psalm 69 are three of the other rare and unassailable examples. The way I see it, any record that manages to make your list deserves due credit, even if everyone you know thinks it sucks.

For me, that’s The Process in a nutshell. It literally sounded like nothing else I’d ever heard before. It was simultaneously more polished and raw, contained and chaotic, and defiant and dying than anything other music I knew about. And no, for the record, I couldn’t get any of my friends excited about it, no matter how hard I tried – although I’m pretty sure my brother thought one of the tracks was okay.

After a number of years out of print, the album is apparently available for purchase once again. I can definitely tell you that no matter what you’ve heard, it’s a fine introduction to the group. Do check it out.

Posted in Currently Enjoying