Customer Reviews

Fun with Knives

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When I told a friend of mine that I just bought Fun with Knives, he told me that The Velvet Acid Christ is cool but weird. He is right. Bryan Erikkson has a really odd sense of humor. I like his style. Influenced by Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails, he creates angry but powerful industrial dance floor music that just makes you want to go crazy. He even adds in samples of movies,ie-Fun with Drugs has Johnny Depps begining monologue from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". Speedball is a song you can listen to when you are just really pissed off at your boss. Go out and get this album!

More than many other industrial albums, or whatever genre or sub-sub genre you want to throw this in, Fun With Knives seems almost too obvious, providing exactly what you would expect from the cover art and track titles.

Providing exactly what you advertise is not wrong, in fact, it's admirable in some way. But the problem is there's nothing really spectacular here, and I'm left wondering why this should be seen as any better than a good portion of Skinny Puppy or some of FLA's better work.

The biggest gripe is the sampling, of course. Sampling can be great, but working an entire piece around a big chunk of the drug speech from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is beyond obvious. C'mon. Good sampling can leave you with a quote in your head that means nothing alone but has bee given weight in the song. You don't want to know the samples already, especially on an overly cliched drug song.

The dark, industrial sound is all there. Select certain synths over a 4/4 beat, and it's industrial, select different synths, and it's another sub-genre...etc. There's a good energy, there's mischief and some demented thoughts, it's basically a pretty good album, but not very distinguished in the end--it won't hold up.

Recommended if you like VAC, or music of a similar vein. But you may find yourself thinking you had the same ideas before you played the album...

I bought Fun With Knives yesterday when I had not even heard anything by VAC, I'd heard they were good, and it was 10$... so I was like "what the hell" and went with it. I do not regret the decision, but I'm not overjoyed by it. The album is a very solid industrial album, bleak, deep, slightly dancy and overall very dark and angry. Fans of "The Downward Spiral"/"Broken" era Nine Inch Nails, "The Mind is a Terrible thing to Taste" era Ministry, Skinny Puppy or Front Line Assembly can not really go wrong here. Sadly, this is more similar to Front Line Assembly's Implode than basically anything, even other FLA albums. It is good, but takes the genre in no new directions, and considering the possibilities that electronica has, it is somewhat disapointing.

My only other gripe is the sampling, there is way too much of it. The "this place is a tomb" or "are we dealing with an epidemic??" on FLA's Implode stuck in my head for a full day after hearing them. Fun With Knives is so overloaded with samples, and they were powerful when I heard them, but minutes later all I would remember was something about violence, killing people or drugs and not much else. Sometimes things are better when used with restraint.

Despite this, it is a good goth/industrial electronica album that will not leave you disapointed. Be warned - I doubt you will be blown away with it either.

I've only listened to VAC for a little over a year now, but I've come to the conclusion that FWK is the transition album, where Brian (Disease Factory) moves from a harsher, noisier style to the more trance-induced technoflow of Twisted Thought Generator. An interesting side effect of said transition is basically what you see and what you get with this album.

As the amazon reviewer said above, Fun With Knives doesn't really advance or shine amongst industrial music. It simply *is*... but that doesn't make it a bad album, or show any lack of effort. It is very accessible and seems to be a good starting album for up and coming fans of VAC or industrial in general. (My first was Neuroblastoma, which for some odd reason, I didn't really listen to much until *after* I got FWK.)

Songs like Icon, and Decypher will ravage the floor for all you dance kiddies, while the darker sounds of Speedball OD (older VAC fans will remember this from somewhere else... :), Fun with Drugs, and Caught will keep the evil alive for people like me who like to scare pedestrians.

Overall, Fun With Knives keeps VAC on the map and is a great listen with great production - hence the 4-star rating... but VAC has done better, with the more raw Calling ov the Dead, and the more evolved and even better-produced (my personal favorite) Twisted Thought Generator. So get this album, but don't stop there - pick up the others as well. All of them are well worth it if you're an industrial fan.

Velvet Acid Christ is like taking an introspective ride on the wild side of the chemical rainbow, only there isn't the wonderland you've always wanted to experience on the other side. Instead of an encapsulated merry-go-round delving into the happy holes within the synthetic rainbow, it a dark and foreboding place where the world is not your friend. Dark clouds rise from the corpses of old thoughts, denouncements roll in and threaten the security of thoughts, and the reality you want to know ends up being nothing but a brittle facsimile pretending to be a dream. And it makes you question, hurt, seethe, and want to ultimnately dismember the world one limb at a time. Yes, its themes like these that have flowed through those experimental skies, endowing Bryan Erickson with more than the ability to vox lyrics, to produce dancebeats on the bleak side of the temponic rainbow, and to sample sounds to help it cohesively come together. Its allowed him to help people feel an ocean of beats writhe through their body while endowing them with subjects on which to think, to feel, and to want to hurt things for.

I've found myself partial to quite a few of VAC's albums, Bryan going through some experimentation on life while I, myself, went through the same "seek syndromes," and I've found myself marveling at some of the productions B. Erickson has made. He seems to understand how to utilize electronics to build both a temple to beat and to theme, allowing one to feel the song. He's also scoured many cinematic/ musical sources to find just the right fit when it comes to the crescendo of sound clips, and then there's the voxing he seems to stick with that makes it all-the-more bleak. When you listen to some of the songs he's built, his voice distorted in an oblivion of questioning and hating, he seems to manifest emotions in those dark lullabies that produce an essence of both hurt and pain. And that, atop all the other constructions, is possibly what I like the most about this under-appreciated artistic mind.

Fun With Knives is something of a rollercoaster ride that wears teeth with feelings, taking you through a myopia of sensations on your way to understanding even more on Erikson's introspective journey. I honestly like the cold truth he gives in it and, oftentimes, the brutality in the journeys as he takes them. There are songs like "Icon" that seem to lash out under an electronically-based yet beautiful beat, producing themes that hate because the mind behind it feels like he, himself, has been hated. Then there are other gears turning this pulsating machine like "Fun With Drugs," with a "skin dripping" action getting into the drug utopia, and then there's the always interesting religion - hating sounds of the slower sonnets like "There is no God." The part I really enjoy the most, though; the darker, more wondrous, sounds I personally like, are also here and here with a vengeance. Yes, there are speed settings for the hatred inside this that go into maximum, like in "Speedball OD" and in the bile that runs out of it and doesn't bother to conceal itself. "I clean up your body parts with a vacuum cleaner" is perhaps the most tamed part of the song that gets me going, making me want top break a few things, and there's luckily more to hold my hand. "Apflux," or the "knife that will slice and dice your mind," mixes with songs like "Psycho," and then there's the title-track, "Fun with Knives." O yeah, it's a boat that takes a journey I personally liked taking.

For anyone not wanting something objectionable, go buy some Enya and sit quietly in the corner because you're in the wrong place. This has violent places in it that are potholed and with pain, hate, and the barrage of other emotions that we all suffer from. It doesn't pretend not to be consumed by them, either, allowing the audience to sit and listen as they spill out of a mouth in which they were allowed to fester. Yeah, this is a trainwreck happening, it playing out in "realtime," and its an interesting experience to ingest because you can honestly relate to all of it - provided you don't kid yourself. And that's all we ever really want, isn't it, to stare at trainwrecks as we pass them by in order to make us feel alive?

Velvet Acid Christ's "Fun With Knives" is a fair album, but one that treads the dangerous line of sounding very generic at times. A few songs sound so much like Skinny Puppy, I thought I had the wrong disc in the player at times.

I mean really, let's look at some of the song titles. "Psycho." "Slut." "There Is No God." "Speedball Overdose." It sounds like an angsty 15 year old came up with these titles.

Are the lyrics any less trite? Let's look at a few examples:

"Decypher":

I look into your mind
I rip apart your soul
I cut into your flesh

"Apflux:"

Pervert the truth
To kill and abuse
Pervert the truth
To kill and abuse

.............. As you can see, not the most insightful band on the face of the planet. But how's the music?

The music is what counts most of all, and, more or less, VAC delivers a solid industrial-techno-metal performance on this album. The samples sometimes sound a little disingenuous, but that's a small gripe. Some of my personal favorites:

"Decypher" - A pleasant ambient-like intro melds seamlessly into a ferocious aural assault, a la Ministry's earlier days.

"The Dark Inside Me" - A surprisingly haunting, harsh, and memorable track. Probably my second favorite on the album.

"Fun With Drugs" - The liberal sampling of Terry Gilliam's movie "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas" alone makes this track a keeper.

And finally, "Slut" - This is, by far, the lyrical and musical highlight of the album. Its subtlety and freshness is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else on the album. Lyrically unfolding in a coy and horrific manner, musically descending into a sublime and edgy ambient-industrial flirtation, anchored by the admirably restrained yet powerful vocals of Anna Christine from Luxt, "Slut" is by far my pick of the album.

"Caught" - Twisted, quietly menacing, and catchy - a visceral, groovy walk on the dark side.

Unfortunately, there are also a number of forgettable tracks on this album - Icon, Speedball, Psycho, Knives, Apflux, and the "hidden" track all didn't really do a thing for me.

So, it's a toss-up whether you should buy this album or not. I would, on the power of "The Dark Inside Me," "Slut," and "Caught" alone.

if you prefer more accessible, dance-ish music, go with fun with knives. otherwise i would reccomend calling ov the dead. calling is by far velvet acid christ's best. the highlights on here are the title track, icon, and speedball o.d. slut has to be my favorite though, i am a big luxt fan as well and anna christine of luxt provided vocals for that song. overall this album was good, but not the best. it would be better without all the samples. the samples got to a point where they didn't enhance the music...they just became irritating.

there isn't a single bad track on this cd! every single one of them shreads up the speakers in their own way. i love the way VAC uses jungle/house type beats with hard industrial synth leads. the whole cd has so much flow, its just keeps pumping along each track with a new song structure. some of my favorite tracks are "Decypher" (of course), "Icon" and "Psycho". one interesting thing i noticed about the album was that VAC sampled lines from "Event Horizon" just like Front Line Assembly's "Implode" (another great cd) VAC even sampled some of the same lines!

if you like Funker Vogt, VNV Nation or Wumpscut then you'll like Velvet Acid Christ alot!

When the CD player stops and the final song ends, you sit there wondering what your ears just heard. Is it an advancement for Velvet Acid Christ? Certainly the conclusion I came to. It has a new-age sound to it, the future of the underground's genres. Even at the beginning of Velvet Acid Christ's work, it's been on that thin boundary of Darkwave/Industrial; the genre.. and creating a new one. This time I think they've stepped one toe over that line. The moral decay/depressing sound is still there, but it's just not as open as in the past work of Velvet Acid Christ. This time they've branched out to discover more boundaries within this new genre they've created in fan's mind in Velvet Acid Christ's past projects. You want something better of Velvet Acid Christ, you want this album. You want something more of the industrial music perhaps you've heard in the past? This album is worth the effort. Velvet Acid Christ is certainly a landmark in the evolution of music.

Although this is many people's fav VAC album.. i prefer twisted thought generator. TTG has alot more progress on it and although this album is excellent in every aspect.. if your new to VAC i would suggest TTG as being your first album