Whitehouse
Great White Death

Fear Shock Perversion

With "Great White Death" the aesthetics of the ugly reaches one of its peaks.

Published in the year 1985 (it is the last work released by the label Come Organization), "Great White Death" is not even the most violent work of the entity Whitehouse (which, we always like to remember, with their 1981 work "Erector", set the standards for an entire branch of electronics, later defined as power electronics, the bastard offspring of the British industrial sound of the seventies).

It is not the most brutal work, but William Bennett finds his full maturity here, and in the deep gap that opens up between the timid chirping of electronics and the terrible iconoclasm of the vocal performance, we find a disconcerting abyss that only increases the dismay in front of a work of such nature.

Bennett is a hyena, a rabid and drooling dog, and titles like "Ass-destroyer", "Rapemaster", "I'm Comin' up your Ass" and "My Cock's on Fire" clearly express the verbal virulence that characterizes the invectives (always with a sexual background) of which the low frequencies in the background are nothing but a sparse sofa where to stage the bloodiest orgies.

"Great White Death" is a cell of a criminal asylum smeared with feces and semen, where Bennett resides, agitates, bangs his head against the wall.

The music is a distant echo, well-made, but little stuff compared to the bestial howls that tear the veil of decency with such authenticity that it seems like witnessing a live recording of a snuff movie: sometimes treated (like the slowed-down mumbling in the title track), here and there filtered, but more often preserved in their vivid and disheartening reality, they represent another stage of the journey that music, no longer music, has bravely undertaken starting from the sound boldness experimented by Throbbing Gristle almost a decade earlier.

The shortness of breath, the perverse panting, the throat-splitting shrieks freeze the blood, the sudden outbursts of wrath cause jolts, like sharp ice slabs driven into the jugular: hatred and agony blend in an uncontrolled soliloquy that finds no relief except in crime, in abuse, in violence towards oneself and others (in Bennett's misogynistic philosophy women generally bear the brunt): a vivid metaphor of the need to unleash that reservoir of compressed drives by the constraints of civilized life, so that man can reconcile with his filthy nature.   

The boundary is now crossed: Bennett, a sort of 20th-century De Sade, seems to fear nothing. He doesn’t care if many are wondering whether his "music" is the work of an artist who has made the extreme his north star, or simply the rambling of a charlatan. Criticisms that, most often, do not come from those bigoted and narrow-minded environments against which his howls are directed (as proof of how Whitehouse also give the most trained ears a hard time). Also because probably, in the comfort of well-furnished homes, strolling with the family on a Saturday afternoon, or sitting on church benches on a Sunday morning, they (the bigots and the narrow-minded) are unaware that someone, deep in a filthy recording studio, or from a stage in some dirty dive, is raging with such fury against them and their way of life.

A fuller sound is found in the last track "My Cock's on Fire", present in the Special Edition which I highly recommend: a droning abyss thirteen minutes long where electronics (a grim bubbling of compressors and guitar distortions) return to do their duty, slithering like a murky river on which Bennett, a hallucinated Jim Morrison, a perverted mechanical Charon, sails freely smearing our ears with all sorts of abominations.

For those who don’t have the heart to waste money on this stuff, they can skillfully compensate by getting a pair of sandpaper gloves and indulging in an in-depth exploration of their own sex.