Skinny Puppy
HanDover

THE REVIEW

When silence settles on the ears like corroding dust, you know you're listening to a record by Skinny Puppy. When from the darkness you know it's possible for a hand (a thousand hands) to appear, ready to seize your pain receptors, and an electrified tongue licks your eyes, making you blind while maximizing your sensations, you know you're savoring "HanDover", a creature that feeds on bare-bones frequencies.

The Ogre weaves the silences, the Ogre is scary enough to let you relax in your bed amidst covers made of cables. The entrance of this structure is Kraftwerkian, dimly lit, with spectral minimalisms dancing around a mechanized voice. Timelessness rules over "Ovirt" just as much as melody commands the icy synths of "Cullorblind", which evokes "robot"-pop shining with feral reflections, pushing into the track with a tiptoeing drumbeat that sticks between the neurons and is reluctant to leave, with dynamics taking shape around tonal beauty, and "Wavy" is a postmortem ballad, an acoustic guitar tortured in reverse, lost among futuristic ghosts, voices filtered from distant planets, until it unfolds into choirs and strings programmed by abandoned automatons. And even when the rhythm lifts the dynamics to join more danceable shores, the symptom of illness does not leave; the bastardness of "Icktums" is a more than concrete example, with its EBM environments under mothballs and synths flickering in bubbles of light.

The atomic-industrial deconstructions of "Point" then lead directly into the Aphextwinian "Noisex" which concludes the journey in high-frequency disturbances, with beats snapping like nerves, and the metallic taste in your mouth extinguishing in glitch explosions, but only after 7 minutes.

This park is still too dark.