We All Need The Clowns To Make Us Smile!!! Killing Jokes Yellow Album...

Give Me The Courage To Face Another Day

A good friend of mine attended a Killing Joke concert in New York a long time ago. Their singer Jaz Coleman apparently was telling the audience to not spit on them, as the whole spitting on your idols routine was not their cup of tea. I guess they didn't listen because a lucky punk in the front row wound up on the receiving end of a big boot to the face. I have been a fan of this band ever since they put out their eponymous first album back in 1980 and they have always seemed to me to be a band that did not suffer fools gladly. These days there are lots of intense bands creating music like this, and I think people can be jaded to angry alternative rock. Dudes singing through megaphones has become a bit of a cliche. But these guys were originators, and they still do it better than their younger competitors.

When I think about Killing Joke, I always come up literary comparisons, Lord of The Flies, J.G.Ballard's
works, 1984, Clockwork Orange, novels about alternate realities, about breakdowns of society. The music is aggressive, passionate, intelligent, with tribal beats combined with a dramatic use of space and suffused with animal spirits. Geordie Walker plays guitar with crushing overwhelming power on this disc. Their music has anthemic quality, but the anthem, unlike political anthems or commercial anthems is trying to invoke people to use their brains and think for themselves. Killing Joke had amassed an impressive discography only to find themselves to fall off the radar a bit. That changed dramatically with the release of their second eponymous recording, their "Yellow Album" in 2003 a timely album that is not for the faint of heart.

This is one intense maelstrom of an album. Apparently the US invasion of Iraq and George Bush's War On Terror was a major impetus for them to reform and put this album together. I think all the sonic noise technology that was developed since Killing Joke's heyday in the 80's was incorporated in the creation of this album. Perhaps the spaciousness of the early albums is sacrificed,  but the album is an furious, molten, no holds barred assault on your senses that justifies any loss in subtlety, like a sonic train wreck. Even more amazingly, Foo Fighter Dave Grohl signed on to play drums on this album. I think that part of the conditions for him joining may have been the rerecording of the legendary song Wardance for the final track. And in case anyone had forgotten his stint as drummer with Nirvana, he demonstrates here that he has not lost a shred of his percussive thunder.

Coleman takes issues by the throat here, like religion zeal and its uses on The Death and Resurrection Show.
Most of the songs are on a personal level here, sometimes from the perspective of the antagonists or conspirators, of that of the victims of warfare and greed, the same old story recurring again and again from time immemorial. There is a lot of Biblical imagery on this album, a patina hiding and justifying baser  and sinister motivations for the new world order. The album is such a pummeler that I have trouble listening to the whole thing at one sitting. Total Invasion the second track is a scorcher about Imperialism coming from the viewpoint of the dominators. Ironically if you don't listen to the lyrics I could imagine this as the type of aggressive music a fighter pilot would play in the cockpit during a bombing mission.

For me the song Blood On Your Hands is the highlight of the album sounding like a song from their Nighttime Album pumped up on steroids. For all the PR and self congratulations, Coleman makes plain the consequences of rapacity that he feels companies must take responsibility for. The song Asteroid is a sonic blur, more like a song from the mosh pit than a Killing Joke song. You'll Never Get To Me is defiant anthem sounding almost like a soccer stadium chant. Seeing Red is another scorching furious powerhouse, as is the penultimate song, The House That Pain Built. Some songs like Dark Forces are a slower groove more of a smoldering fuse than a speeding juggernaut. As previously noted, the album very aptly ends with the legendary Wardance, a bona fide punk classic, connecting the modern world with an older outwardly animalistic past. You may not completely agree with the bands conspiracy laced cynical view of the people who run the world today, but it is tough not to enjoy such a great furious torrent of music here.