My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult - Spooky Tricks (2014)
I saw these guys last summer with one "DJ Toxic Rainbow" at a crappy little club with shit acoustics. It was a spur of the moment kind of thing, totally unplanned, but when I saw that they were playing I said "what the hell." After all, I spent a fair chunk of my teenage years digging into WaxTrax! bands and signees of Trent Reznor's Interscope housed Nothing imprint as a result of my love for the early work of Nine Inch Nails and Ministry.
Seeing them triggered some nostalgic urge to check out their more recent recordings, and even though the camp and cheese are more present than ever, I can't help the fact that I genuinely enjoy this kind of music. I can see how it's influenced many of the current generation's more tongue in cheek, pseudo electronic artists like Tobacco/Black Moth Super Rainbow, Octopus Project, Dan Deacon and (my beloved) Fuck Buttons and Black Bug.
It's like... well, remember when White Zombie was actually a pretty good band? Before Rob Zombie started making music exclusively for the Ozzfesy crowd, ignoring his dance-floor pedigrees and trading in synths for a backing band that amounted to little more than a bush league imitation of Antichrist Superstar era Marilyn Manson? ... well, MLWTTKK is kinda like that. Only with the new-wavey noire vocals of KMFDM.
There's a lot to like about this album, if not a great deal to *love.* It makes for a good listen that takes me back to the archaeological investigations of industrial dance that followed the breakout success of The Downward Spiral: a record that came out at the perfect time, when alt rock was fading into purposeless post-grunge monotony.
... Probably not a particularly popular band on this board, but y'know, fuck it. It's good shit.