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37 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The next evolution of the Puppy Twins, February 5, 2007
Times change and people change. Everyone has a favorite band(or two) that has left behind a defining sound to try explore new horizons. Skinny Puppy are no different. We should be so glad that we can get the type of variety out of one band in a world(now)filled with banal, boring, and simply generic label-manufactured bands. I have listened to the Puppy all my life and I have rolled with the changes and losses( RIP Dwayne). I think change is necessary to stay relevant. How could a band be less relevant by changing when indeed time is also contantly changing?
Anyway, the newer Puppy sound is definitley more modern electronic to be sure. Although, what has not change(and shouldn't) is their core sound. The dark and grim atmospherics are still there. I do miss the horror film samples that I had fun figuring out which film they came from, but the lush complexities in the newer production style gives Mythmaker an epic feel. I notice also an Aphex Twin-esque influence with the trip-hop break-beats. The electronic drums have become WAY more intricate and varied which I think is a good thing. The beats will dance all around your head with this record. The melodicness is also great especially when paired with SP's usual dark themes. There is mild sampling on this album, but obviously not as much as past efforts. Most notable is the sample from Body Snatchers in Dal. Ogre's voice is distorted more than ever, and certainly more than his solo project, but its is more of a robotic distortion and less a monsterous one like the Puppy of old. To make a long story short, if you are a die-hard Skinny Puppy fan from way back AND also have an open mind then you will enjoy this album thoroughly. This is a great album filled with lush soundscapes and production, killer dark synth lines and the usual disturbing and violent lyrical imagery. Please don't even bother comparing this to past releases. This is 2007, not 1988. It is a modern Puppy, but this Puppy (bites) hard and doesnt let go until 48 mins later. Ogre and cEvin have done well. A must-have for true SP fans. Totally worth repeated listens.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Dog Walks Among Us, March 10, 2007
The Kevins (Ogilvie and Crompton, aka Nivek Ogre and cEvin Key respectively) have been making music for the better part of my life. For twenty-five years, dance floors have shaken and PA systems have whined and protested under the assault that Skinny Puppy launches with their work. In 2004, The Greater Wrong of the Right took me by surprise. At the time of the CD release, the band had been essentially defunct for the better part of thirteen years. Rumors had circulated through the club scenes and across the "better to doubt it than to believe it" discussion forums of the online community-at-large that Key was working with Ogre and Mark Walk on the tour supporting OhGr's SunnyPsyOp as a drummer.
That rumor turned out to be true. Not too long afterwards, a new Skinny Puppy release was locked in the sweaty-handed death grip of my thick, troll-like fingers.
A tour followed - a long tour, all things being equal - and then all that we thirty-somethings who were still clinging to the resurrected legend of Skinny Puppy could hope for was that the new Puppy release was not a singular event. With the 2007 release of Mythmaker, my fears related to the singularity have been assuaged.
The Greater Wrong of the Right was a glimpse through the keyhole at the musical and sonic evolutions that Key and Ogre have experienced in their time away from one another. The sound was familiar, but it was markedly different. This was to be expected. Both artists had grown and had found their respective levels of comfort with their art forms in the time it took them to reinvent their respective identities outside of Skinny Puppy. Thirteen years later, two very different people got back together and reinvented the outfit that, for many people, was the definitive example of North American industrial music.
Mythmaker, while affording Key and Ogre their individualism as musician and artist and possessing the "updated" sound of the current iteration of Skinny Puppy, reaches back in time. Back into the closets. Back down into some of the hidden holes and shallow graves that the band had dug with their bare hands back in the day when they began pioneering away from Winnipeg and into the faces of the rest of the world, changing the meaningless term of "post-punk" into the force to be reckoned with genre of modern industrial music.
The vocal similarities between Too Dark Park and Mythmaker cannot be denied. Ogre is at his personal best for this effort. Key's music is stunning regardless of the vehicle he chooses to deliver it... but he has never been as impressive with his side-projects and solo efforts as he has been when he is composing the sounds that are the spinal column of Skinny Puppy. Mythmaker is no exception, and the music he has delivered with this effort is easily a toe-to-toe match for his critically acclaimed solo works such as The Dragon Experience and The Ghost of Each Room.
The movie samples are back (I caught at least one from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"), and while there is some filtering and production on Ogre's vocals throughout various tracks, they are vastly less harsh and than they have been on past albums where his vocals were rendered inaudible for all intents and purposes. The production and direction of Ken Marshall is absolutely top notch stuff, and Puppy has not sounded quite THIS GOOD in a long time. There just are not any disappointing tracks on this CD. Even the tracks that seem forgettable at first will grow on the listener over the course of three or four complete spins of the disc.
Everything just kind of seems to come together, seamlessly in fact, throughout the ten tracks of Mythmaker. This is one of those Puppy releases that you pop into your player, and before you know it... it's over. Every track compliments the next, hearkening back to the era of Too Dark Park and Last Rights... but with the overall maturity of sound inherent to The Greater Wrong of the Right.
As I said in the beginning, Skinny Puppy has been making music for the better part of my life. At thirty-five, I'm pretty far removed from the club scene and from the majority of the live shows that I'd like to see. I have a child, a wife and a career now, and while music used to be my obsession - something that came first and foremost in my life - I'm not even sure that it is in the top ten of my current lists of priorities. But when I hear Mythmaker, I feel young again. I feel like I did when I discovered Skinny Puppy for the first time. That is an absolutely fantastic feeling.
I won't be missing this tour.
The Dog is resurrected and walks among us again.
Long live Skinny Puppy.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Puppy People return, May 3, 2007
To not fully love this CD causes a bit of conflict in me, for there are tenets abided by here that I often hold dear to my ideas about good music. One tenet is that a band of history (1980's industrial history, to be exact), when coming out with new stuff, should indeed sound new and not just a rehashing of what worked for them in the past. To this, Skinny Puppy holds true--there are of course elements of Skinny Puppy dissonance, that clash of sounds and noise that makes Puppy industrial some of the most wonderfully rough out there, but at the same time there is the paradox of their sound being a little more clean and refined. Another review of this disc that I had read made some connections between Skinny Puppy and Aphex Twin, and I think the connection is a fair one to make. The progress of sound is essential for a band to continue to grow, even after the loss of a mate, so on this disc Skinny Puppy delivers a new era of band sound while still maintaining an essence of what distinguished them in the first place. I wouldn't necessarily call this disc their most accessible (how can "Worlock" NOT be accessible?), but it is certainly a little cleaner and a little more towards electronica.
In the same sort of vein as the first tenet lay, the second tenet has to do with a band not sounding like they are beating a dead horse. Another review I read lamented a bit over the much more restricted use of snippets from obscure movies. This disc still offers a bit of this, but nothing like the clip-fest "Rivers" with HAL9000 and FVK and such. Again, Skinny Puppy advances their sound.
But what keeps me from just tooting a trumpet and announcing the triumphant and continued existence of Skinny Puppy? I'm close to that, but it does seem that there is just a little bit holding these Puppies back. It's hard not to think that it has something to do with a no-doubt cleaned up act, considering the history and effects of drugs this band has had to deal with, but I don't like to speculate to the point of feeling that I know the answer. In the day of Aphex Twin and what I like to call "techno of evil," which are really the results of superclean digital toying with an eye for the dark, it is kind of nice to see that Skinny Puppy can step into that arena and teach these young whipper-snappers what REALLY evil techno sounds like, but it seems as though it's at a bit of a sacrifice. Ogre doesn't come across as such a solid presence of the music in this, maybe because his voice gets a little too touched-up in the mixing process. In its earlier incarnation, Skinny Puppy showed how there could be weight and mud and blood in the realm of electronics, and this time around perhaps they've let the electronic revolution swallow them up a bit.
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