The Beat Surrender

Nice one Kevin, another heavy album to review. This is the latest from Killing Joke, a four piece band that have been around for a long time now, with several albums under their belts.

While listening, I found myself reminded of a couple of different bands when I first listened to this album. From a guitar point of view, they can sound a bit Ministry-ish, also rather a lot like White Zombie. There are elements of Voivod in there also, and vocally they sound a bit Fear Factory-ish.

So that’s who they sound like – vaguely – but what does their music sound like? Killing Joke don’t stick to the formulaic verse, verse, chorus, verse structure that most bands rely on. This make for a nice change. The album is comprised of steady rhythms throughout with a lot of fast beats, however some of the songs seem like one long verse.

And you get your value for money also; there is some right duration on some of the songs. Track three “Invocation”, for example, weighs in at just under eight minutes. This may not sound very long to you, but compare this to your average three minute chart topper and you will notice the difference. This is a personal favourite of mine and is a relentless, Olympic piece; get down the gym with this on your headphones, you’ll knack yourself.

Also the production on the album is showcased on this track in the beautiful harp strumming and atmospheric strings in the song – without these it could just have been another repetitive pounder. All production has been done by the band, and they’ve done a good job.

The whole album has some sort of electrickery (synths etc.) involved in and amongst, and normally I don’t like this sort of thing, but it really works for me on “Hosannas…”. It’s just subtle enough to enhance the songs, rather than distracting from them and turning everything into a school kid’s ring-tone.

As stated previously, this is a mark of the production that has gone into the album. Speaking of production, it’s not all about sound, it can also be about how the piece looks, and the whole thing is complimented by some rather tasty artwork on the album cover by a guy called Viktor Safonkin (check out his work).

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