Cop Shoot Cop
Ask Questions Later

THE REVIEW

The city is completely empty.

Silence and wind dominate every corner, every street, every alley. No trace of any inhabitants; the gray skyscrapers towering against the leaden sky have long been abandoned, store doors and windows are completely boarded up, while the skeletons of some other buildings stand as evidence that the bombings reached here, but will very likely have no end.

Scattered everywhere, the true inhabitants of this bleak scenario are the debris: debris of computers, TVs, cables, wires, screens of all sizes, phones, antennas, circuits, microchips..... they occupy streets and the sides of houses, piled along walls, heaped in the middle of a square or in some garbage bin too full to contain them all. They have lost their splendor, witnesses of a civilization now in ruin, dominated by man-machines who sold their humanity and placed their blind faith in the cold steel of machines; those same machines they created and which led them to a slow and inexorable downfall.....

If all this were true, the perfect soundtrack for this new world wouldn't be one composed by some brutal and apocalyptic metal band or by some malevolent and solemn composer, but rather that of Cop Shoot Cop and their third album "Ask Questions Later," an album that has become a cult for the entire '90s decade. Children of the irreverent no wave of the '80s and the most psychotic and aberrant industrial, the New York quartet led by singer Tod Ashley takes us by the hand in this desolate city, extolling with a sardonic and pleased smile the future of the new post-human generation. Unlike other bands of the same period, like Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, and Godflesh, Cop Shoot Cop develop a different industrial sound: it's a more melodic industrial, but with twisted and at times tribal melodies, disturbed by noise-flavored frequencies, but with a strong ironic component: the American group acknowledges our fallen modernity and, like mad jesters, dances over its ruins, because nothing else can be done.

Mentioning every track is impossible and also unnecessary; in "Ask Questions Later" it's the whole that's astonishing: "Surprise, Surprise" will shock you with its violence, with percussion at the forefront (the group didn't have a drummer), "Room 429" with its sarcastic yet tension-filled melody, and "Cut To The Chase" for its hypnotic and metallic atmosphere, upon which lies a dreamy, oriental-flavored violin..... and so it goes for the rest of the album.

Dark, distressing, grotesque, violent, unsettling but also ironic, hypnotic, and irreverent: this and much more are "Ask Questions Later" and Cop Shoot Cop, a band that managed to renew atmospheric industrial music, but that remained unknown to most for far too long.

End of the city, road blocked: there's no going back.