plorentz's Full Review: Hosannas From the Basement of Hell by Killing Joke
In order to really feelHosannas from the Basements of Hell, I have to blast it, and then leave the room, and listen to it from somewhere else. For one thing, that's the only way I'll be able to stay awake - because loud music at loud volumes (and Killing Joke must be played loud - it says so in the liner notes) invariably has a powerful sedative effect on this listener. But also, it's at that kind of distance that the music actually starts to make some kind of sense on a gut level.
This discovery was purely accidental. I am no audiophile, and I didn't arrive at this conclusion through hours of controlled study or rigorous scientific method. I'd actually been listening to Hosannas in my car for several days, but I found that I could never turn up the volume loud enough to hear it. I could hear it, of course - I'm not deaf - but I couldn't find a way into it. (Plus, after two or three tracks, I'd have to switch to something brighter - y'know, Paul Carrack or something - to remedy my inevitable drowsiness, especially with all that construction on East Wash.) Then one day, after getting home, I retreated to my little music room down in the lowest level of our house, and plopped this baby in the stereo. Unfortunately, right at that moment, the phone was ringing (it was James), so I left the room to take his call, and we chatted for awhile about this and that, and I happened to be sitting down at the computer desk while we were chatting, and after we were done I started checking e-mail and stuff, and that's when I first really heard Hosannas From the Basements of Hell. In this case, though, the Hosannas just happened to be coming from our basement. But it worked. You can't just hearHosannas. You have to overhear it.
In his liner notes to the album, lead bellower Jaz Coleman evokes the haunted spirit of Old Prague where the band recorded the album. And I, the pathetically untravelled, find myself imagining what those old streets must be like every time I hear the record. I imagine lots of weather-worn stone engravings, and cathedral spires darkened by the ghosts of plague and war and just, y'know, time - on one of those come-Armageddon-come Sundays Morrissey sings about. Of course, I'm alone on these streets; but then I hear a sort of subterranean rumble that seems to emanate from the cobblestones themselves. Hints of melody. Hints of rhythm that grow more distinct the longer I wander around the place. Soon I can make out drums, though I feel like I'm hearing them not just at a distance - delayed, like the pops and thunderous rolls of a fireworks display - but also through ungodly thick walls of centuries-old brick.
And this is how Hosannas comes to life. This is how I can actually hear what the band is doing, and what the band is doing is pretty wonderful, though not entirely new. It's hard to hear "Implosion", for instance, without also thinking of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir"; but then, also, from this distance, it's hard to listen to "Walking With Gods", and not hear a big gay disco anthem enshrouded within the song's harsh, industrial grind. With a few minor lyrical adjustments, I could totally hear Erasure running with the song, and turning it into the kind of post-AIDS dancefloor absolution upon which they banked their career in the mid-90s. There's the soaring, simple melody; the bright guitar melody that fills the spaces between verses like the string breaks on a Gloria Gaynor record; and that thump-thump-thumping mirror-ball-and-fog-machine beat.
The message is powerful - and powerfully positive (ie: Killing Joke - and music in general - is a uniter, not a divider) - but the sound throughout is willfully murky, full of unruly echo and space; the band deliberately chose to go with old, rattled gear to create this work to counter the increasingly polished (but no less brutal) sound of some of their more recent records(like the wonderful Pandemonium album). The playing is uniformly brutal; but though there's little delicacy in the sound of the record, there are hints of detail in the arrangements. The sound may be flat, but the songs hint at layers, like underground caverns or sewage tunnels, to be explored. And that's what makes the record so compelling.
That, and the general concept behind the album, delivered in the lyrics of the opening "Tribal Antidote", and the closing "Gratitude" - that live performance isn't just a living for this band, or mere entertainment for the fans, but that through performance, the band and the fans acheive a sort of pagan communion with each other - an underground nirvana - a darker version of heaven. This is music that's more about ritual than song. In that sense, we can't really hear it on record. It doesn't belong on record at all. (Killing Joke understands this, too.) We can only eavesdrop, like anthropologists observing a society isolated from our modern world. But hey, that can be fun too.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Hosannas from the Basement of Hell" by Killing Joke
Cooking Vinyl Records
Released 4/18/06
Produced by Killing Joke
62 min.
SONGS: This Tribal Antidote - Hosannas from the Basement of Hell - Invocation - Implosion - Majestic - Walking With Gods - The Lightringer - Judas Goat - Gratitude
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