Month: March 2023

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Full Spectrum Relevance

Killing Joke
‘Full Spectrum Dominance’
Released 10 March 2023 (streaming only)

Following the Lord of Chaos EP by just less than a year, this latest single from Killing Joke is in the same vein as that EP’s two new tracks: gargantuan riffs, sophisticated melodic tension, brutal rhythmic power, subtle syncopation, lyrics that again confront our rapidly accelerating dystopia, and a signature Geordie coda to end. Here that coda leads us into the closing bookend: a disconcertingly subtle synth drone that also opens the track, evoking a future Armageddon – or the echo of one that has already happened while we were looking the other way.

Can we stop this apocalypse? Perhaps if we understand its origins and progenitors, so here the Joke apply their advanced sonic weaponry to warn us about powers that already control us with a peacetime version of the US military’s concept of ‘full-spectrum dominance’. This is the idea that a conquering force must dominate the enemy across every element of the theatre – from psychological warfare to the denial of basic resources. But as the Joke have clocked: there is no ‘peacetime’ – our own governments are at war with us, their own citizens.

If the unsettling main motif reminds you of The Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’, that’s because both songs combine the minor key with an Augmented Scale – each having the same root note – to uncannily haunting effect. In the verses, Jaz calls back to the first two Joke albums by conjuring social alienation with the ‘bars of my bedroom cell’, though ‘cell’ also suggests a hive or network of dis-eased automata. We are all infected with pathogens both biological and psychological, spreading our germs as ‘the world turns’. We worship the ‘leviathan’, which resonates with KJ’s ‘Total’: we are controlled by a power so behemothic, so monolithic, that we cannot ever see it clearly, let alone fight it: ‘resistance is futile’. But go deeper and there’s resonances with Christianity (leviathan as devil), Gnosticism (the leviathan as ouroboros keeping us forever separated from the divine) and Hobbes (the hegemony of materialism, and a social contract now so degraded that our governments steal from and kill us with impunity).

Jaz’s voice sounds better than ever: his baritone clear and clean but with a depth and edge grown from 45 years of work – both musical and magickal. And that voice is at its best in the post-prog bridge as Geordie and Youth vamp from B Lydian to B-flat Phrygian (which have the same notes), creating harmonic tension ‘as cabals rise to prominence’ – a tension that’s not quite resolved by the B-flat Lydian chorus proclaiming the unassailable power of those cabals. We are dominated in every realm. The only escape is to remove ourselves from the spectrum entirely. Easier said than done, obviously.

The final two stanzas reference the computer modelling used to wargame the myriad of our possible ends in such a way that an elite always comes out on top. ‘It’s just a game, a grand simulation’ for the rich because they’ll always have what they need. Whoever created this ‘masterplan’ has ensured that a powerful few will survive. This is followed by a sublime juxtaposition of organic and inorganic matter, recalling subterranean strands in the Joke’s thematic DNA: ‘acacia leaves and microwave trees’. Those leaves have an occult allusion: a sprig of acacia signifies immortality in Freemasonry, suggesting that the cabals that control – billionaires and their useful idiots – are aiming to live for a Pharaonic eternity while the rest of us are consumed by the effects of ecological breakdown – if we haven’t already been poisoned by toxic air, water and soil. Big Paul’s annihilation express propels us towards that Geordie coda and our impending doom, cut short before we can properly acknowledge or understand it.

Released two days before they performed their first two albums at the Royal Albert Hall (reviewed here), ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ reminds us that the Joke continue to record new music that is both a natural progression from – and in fractal dialogue with – their earlier work (and Mike Coles’s artwork for the new single deliberately references his cover for 1980’s ‘Wardance’). Wisdom and experience have sharpened rather than dulled Killing Joke’s righteous fury, added new layers rather than undercut those they’ve already laid down. The Joke’s relevance is still full-spectrum.

Pre-order Killing Joke On Track from Amazon in the UK here.

Killing Joke – Full Spectrum Dominance – YouTube

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Discord Mirth

Killing Joke
Royal Albert Hall, London, 12 March 2023

When Killing Joke reformed with the original line-up towards the end of 2007, they returned to the first two albums of the three they had recorded together before Youth’s departure in 1982, rehearsing two live sets that would be previewed in Tokyo before the band’s triumphant two nights at the Forum in October 2008. These London concerts (released first as Live at the Forum and then as The Gathering) feature all 16 tracks from Killing Joke (1980) and What’s THIS For…! (1981).

At this point I should probably mention that the Joke’s second LP is not only my favourite album by the Ladbroke Grove jesters but one of my favourite albums by any band, and the promise of hearing it live and entire had been almost too much to bear since the gig – impishly titled ‘Follow the Leaders’ – was announced in June last year (anticipation that was duly rewarded when Youth swapped his signature Rickenbacker for the hybridised fretless which defines the loose, lurking, low-end elasticity of What’s THIS For…!).

Plummet headlong 15 catastrophic years on planet world and that same line-up is still intact, having released three new studio albums, a flurry of live sets, two benchmark remix collections, an EP including two new tracks and, a couple of days before this latest Gathering, a new single. But the gravitational pull of those first two landmark albums is justifiably inexorable and on 12 March 2023 at the Royal Albert Hall, Killing Joke again performed both discs – this time in the original running order. And how fortuitous the date, with the Joke yet again scheduling a magickal ritual just as a major bank went down (this is something of a trend across the band’s career with the Global Financial Crisis and the 2008 reunion happening pretty much simultaneously).

If you imagine this career pinnacle to be an exercise in nostalgia or retirement planning, then you are sorely mistaken. Played at breakneck pace with only one of Jaz’s deliberately provocative song introductions (“There’s going to be a Third World War!”), this was Killing Joke yet again proving that they remain the most vital of the bands that formed in the wake of punk’s magnesium burn. Honed across four sold-out club gigs in the preceding week, this was the band leaner, tighter and more forceful than ever.

Anchored by Big Paul’s megalithic metronomy and Geordie’s dendritic dissonance – constantly branching across multiple scales and modes – Youth and Jaz prowled the stage like the now-wily wolves of the Joke’s classic ‘Pssyche’, here a glorious fourth and final encore. You could even argue that with the Joke in this incarnation – fast approaching a cumulative 20-year mark – it is Big Paul and Geordie who are the rhythm section, holding the surface tension across the band’s occult ocean, while Youth circles in the sonic depths like an anarchist shark and Jaz glides, swoops and dives like a shaman in sea-eagle form: forcing us to confront our fears and self-loathing, and in our catharsis releasing us from the dead weight of deception and apathy so that the shaman can once again resume his human form.

The first album is so well known to Gatherers that it’s almost impossible to conceive of a new approach, but this adrenalised attack pulled all eight tracks into an inexorable charge of the dark brigade, taking in Cold-War dread, the terror of hot war, industrial decay, and social alienation. The second 8 tracks continued this forced march into the abyss, with social engineering, psychological breakdown, and ecological collapse. And it was in these tracks – especially the rarely performed but here thrillingly urgent ‘Who Told You How?’ and ‘Exit’ – that the theme of the evening came into focus: a society spiralling into psychosis while wondering which colour to paint the living room.

The leanness and pinpoint focus of the music and themes were echoed by the sparseness of the staging, with only two simple banners heralding the band’s discord mirth and a single video screen showing a stream of original, found and sampled images from the band’s regular collaborator Mike Coles (who designed the cover art for both of the albums being played).

The first three encores – all from the band’s first year – were the Joke’s very first composition ‘Are You Receiving?’, ‘Change’ (never more exasperatedly direct an edict, or cuttingly ironic a question) and the endtimes dub ‘Turn to Red’. Presciently paranoid 40-plus years ago; outrageously oracular today. There really is no-one better with whom to wait in Armageddon’s lobby.

Pre-order Killing Joke On Track from Amazon in the UK here.