At one point Killing Joke were one of the most bulletproof post-punk bands around. Releasing their first single in 1978, they were right there with Wire and Gang of Four as indisputable early pioneers of the genre. In an era of Cold War hostilities and Reaganomics the band's (dead serious) brand of apocalyptic beats and conspiracy-oriented lyrics hit home with an entire generation raised on imagery of impending destruction. Then, somewhere along the line, the wheels came off.
"Nervous System" was a decent if inauspicious introduction to the band, essentially blending the choppy, jagged chords of Wire with the whiteboy reggae affectations that The Clash had become known for. Not a bad tune, but it doesn't really transcend either of those two obvious influences.
1980's "Wardance" was where it all came together: lead-fisted, martial beats combine with Geordie Walker's own innovative guitar textures to set the template for things to come, though if you encountered the song 30 years ago you'd be forgiven if you initially mistook it for a Joy Division outtake.
"Requiem" goes much farther toward establishing a unique identity, the band dialing back the guitars and laying the keyboards on THICK! With its endgame lyrical imagery and air raid synth patches, though, it nonetheless wasn't that far removed from what Gary Numan was doing at the time. At this point Jaz Coleman's vocal delivery was the primary point of differentiation between Killing Joke and their contemporaries, although the songwriting was immediate enough that the aforementioned influences would have been proud to call these tunes their own.
Geordie's guitar playing would gradually grow simultaneously more opaque and ethereal, until by their fifth single ("Empire Song") Killing Joke were essentially setting the bar in terms of metallic abrasion… at least within a standard rock context. By this point synthpop was softening into the maudlin, commercially directed New Romantic movement, and post-punk was largely abandoning its confrontational edge in favor of more cerebral, art school fare. Killing Joke had no interest in following suit, and as such began drawing more and more inspiration from the underground industrial scene, spearheaded (and named by) fellow Englishmen Throbbing Gristle.
As one of the "catchier" bands to be associated with the industrial scene, Killing Joke predictably became one of its higher profile acts, although listening from the perspective of hindsight their allegiances were always loyal to post-punk… they would never fully cross over to the industrial (or, later, EBM) side of the fence. Any industrial flourishes were largely cosmetic, the sheet metal din of Walker's guitar work and Paul Raven's militaristic percussion often obscuring the fact that these guys were still a lot closer to Public Image Ltd than they were to Test Dept.
1985's "Love Like Blood" signaled a prominent change in the band's sound, a slow, dirge-like rhythm underlining a goth rock-like sense of pathos in Jaz's singing. That trend would culminate the next year with the incomprehensibly unheralded track "Adorations", one of the most overlooked songs in the band's catalog, if not the entire decade itself.
Unfortunately, this experimental drive and refusal to rest on their laurels came back to bite them with 1988's Outside the Gates album. Largely regarded as the least popular in the band's catalog, much has been made of the mainstream keyboard sound dominating the album in place of the usual guitars, but in truth the songwriting just wasn't up to the group's usual standards: "America" and "My Love of This Land", both present here, show the band coasting for the first time in their decade-long history to that point.
They rebounded strongly with 1990's Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions – "Money Is Not Our God" is truly one of the great anti-capitalist anthems of all time – but momentum had begun to wane slowly but surely over the years, and Killing Joke splintered altogether in 1991. Jaz relocated to a remote island in New Zealand and the remaining members briefly carried on as Murder Inc. with Chris Connelly (Revolting Cocks, Pigface) on vocals.
The split turned out to be a mere three-year breather, original members Jaz, Geordie and bassist Martin "Youth" Glover reconnoitering with new drummer Tom Larkin to record the high profile comeback, Millennium. In the years between the ill-fated Outside the Gates experiment and that 1994 comeback, the popularity of Nine Inch Nails and Ministry (among others) had made industrial metal the hottest thing in hard rock at the time.
Coming a mere five months after the release of The Downward Spiral – arguably the Rosetta Stone of second wave industrial – Millennium was clearly an attempt to reestablish Killing Joke as a powerhouse within a genre they helped to define, but singles like the title track and "Pandemonium" seemed stiff and old-fashioned, neither as heavy as Ministry nor as cathartic as Trent Reznor. "Exorcism" in particular seemed to be trying way too hard, and the album as a whole seemed too thin to support an unprecedented four singles (though the last of those, "Jana", is one of the more overlooked entries in the KJ catalog).
Suitably rebuffed, Coleman and co. went back to their strengths two years later with "Democracy", a radio-friendly single which garnered zero airplay in spite of accomplishing exactly what the band had set out to do on Millennium, namely to craft catchy songs without compromising their politics or identity.
Didn't matter, Killing Joke have since gone on to accept their roll as oft-name checked, seldom-heard forefathers of the post-punk/industrial vanguard. The dearth of eyes and ears have given them the luxury of sitting back and letting inspiration happen rather than rushing material to fit some record label's fixed album/tour cycle. They've been on an absolute tear since 2006's triumphant Hosannas from the Basement of Hell, adding classic after modern classic to an already formidable canon.
That said, this compilation does suffer from one notable constraint: often a band miscalculates the strength of their own material, failing to release what are later regarded as classics as singles to begin with, sometimes substituting them for alternates of lesser historical regard… so while relatively minor entries like "Chop-Chop" and "My Love of This Land" are included, numerous undisputed classics aren't here because they technically weren't released on a 7" or 12" single: "The Fall of Because", "The Wait", "Chessboards" and even more recent stunners such as "Absolute Dissent" and "The Great Cull" (particularly hard to believe that "European Super State" and "Ghosts of Ladbroke Grove" were chosen over the latter two from the same album).
Initial copies – it's unclear how many – come with a bonus third disc featuring unreleased tracks, b-sides and soundtrack contributions. It's an amusing if inessential roundup of 10 mostly late-era KJ tracks, including the surprisingly abrasive "Hollywood Babylon" from the Showgirls OST and no fewer than three outtakes from the Absolute Dissent album (of which only "Timewave" transcends curio status). It's a nice freebie, but considering all the essential tunes omitted due to their non-single status it would have been nice to see this bonus disc given over to rounding up those must-have strays.
10/10
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