Killing Joke
Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions

THE REVIEW

After the gradual incursion of their discography into multi-instrumental and overly intellectual realms starting with the memorable "Night Time", 1990 marks the return of Killing Joke to the international music scene with a double album of provocative, controversial tones that are angrier than ever.

"Extremities, dirt and various repressed emotions" is a work of frightening intensity, endowed with evocative powers that few have managed to reformulate later on, though it has often been attempted to imitate. A dozen tracks that revisit and update themes and styles from their golden era, the most experimental one - if you will - that at the beginning of the '80s permanently marked the territory of the post-punk wave.
The God of Money, greed, civil struggle, solitude, the memories of another childhood: these are the contents on which Jaz Coleman and company hit hard, dragging the listener into a vortex of truly extreme sensations built on hammering syncopated rhythms, tortured guitars, verses screamed like battle cries. There is no room for heartfelt reflection, except in the episode of "Solitude," a remarkable ballad with a post-apocalyptic flavor that leads to the Arabic instrumental "Kaliyuga" and the final explosion of "Struggle". The horizons towards which the gaze is directed for almost the entire album are those stormy of desert oases swept by the wind, of metropolitan profiles bloodied by the law of profit, of living cemeteries populated by the zombies of the modern era.
More than in albums already rough like "What's this for..." and "Revelations" that years before tried to shape the suburban magma of punk, here the approach of the British band with the sound becomes a search for new harmonic and rhythmic paths: Martin Atkins' counterpoints (formerly a drummer with PIL) that subvert vague jazz echoes to aggressively pour them into metal, the sharp keyboards underlying Geordie Walker's schizophrenic and extremely compact guitar riffs, Coleman's beastly vocalizations bordering on cardiac arrest that overshadow the sensation of a radioactive wind permeating the entire album. The lesson of the previous "Outside the Gate" - which was a conceptual digression with almost art-rock undertones - seems to have stimulated the Killing Joke to throw themselves back into the fray to reassert the idea of a world that should reset itself, aligning with the law of nature; and no longer fighting with the weapon of reason and dialectics, but with teeth and nails.
Thus, absolutely overwhelming songs like "Intravenous", "North of the Border", "Age of Greed" seize the listener's guts and lead in a swirling crescendo to the final declaration of "Struggle", an unyielding ride speaking of a creed of life never renounced by Killing Joke: the struggle is hard, the struggle is long, the struggle is beautiful.
Masterpiece.