Search - Skinny Puppy :: Last Rights

Leif H. (Leif) from CROSS PLAINS, WI
Reviewed on 8/10/2006...

Some of Skinny Puppy's great experiments from the height of their career.

Last rights on vinyl!!!

Raul Sembrano | h town tx | 12/02/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I bought this last night @ the skinny puppy show houston ( awesome show by the way! ) Wow this sound so great, specially with an album full of little noises ambiance and electronics...you will hear subtle sounds that you barely hear on the old cd copy....if you dont have a turntable its ok because a cd copy is included : ) and the cd sounds better than the old copy...so if you like puppy get this for cryin out loud!!!!!"

Everything around me seemed to move in slow motion... a Nouv

Jonathan Dedward | Nowheresville, Slothwestern North America | 10/20/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Of all Skinny Puppy's work, their 1991 album Last Rights is their most tormented, distorted, difficult to listen to... and Definitely their best. Or their worst, if you hate Skinny Puppy to begin with. Let's be honest here. This isn't a pleasant musical experience. In fact most people wouldn't find this very musical at all. I guess that was the point.



Everything about Last Rights enforces the concept of entropy on a sort of global scale. The lyrics, even when you can make them out, are particularly inscrutable. Ogre's trademark "stream of consciousness" writing seems to be polluted with toxic waste. Good luck trying to find a specific meaning in any of the songs. Anyway, most of the time individual words are lost and all that remains is the sound of Ogre's manic chants and gibbers, electronically ground-up and spat back out. And then there is the insane music. To say the music backdrop is austere is a bit of an understatement. It is one of the bleakest soundscapes I've ever come across. It's so processed and layered that it often turns into a digitized jumble of dour tones and electronic cackles and fuzz. It's like listening to something on a 100 year-old tape that is on the verge of crumbling to dust. Or, on second thought, a corrupted mp3 file, as songs are frequently punctuated by what sound like fragments of other songs and bits of films. In short, it's a typical Skinny Puppy work. Except it's about ten times more so.



The cd itself is pretty bare-bones, mixed very low with a pretty quiet bass tone so you really gotta turn this one up to get the full effect. I often wonder how this would sound remastered, but I am sure it would probably lose that deathly feeling if it was mixed any other way.



So, it expresses unpleasant feelings and sounds unpleasant. Why do I love it? Because above all it is a beautiful recording. Endlessly fascinating, rich and complicated, it tears (and beats) itself into you and doesn't let go. This is the sound of a band completely letting their creativity run wild, putting their full effort into something and emerging with a product of pure emotional power. Surprising, considering the Industrial genre isn't known for being particularly emotive. It's fitting that the band itself was completely wasting away and self-destructing in the midst of its recording. Sadly, this really is the highpoint and a eulogy of sorts for Skinny Puppy, as this album concluded their old-school kind of sound. Things would be a lot different on their next album...



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