These are just a few of the terms you’re likely to run across if you Google a few reviews of the singular entity known as Skinny Puppy. One of Canada’s most important and lasting contributions to pop culture (they are definitely the anti-Barenaked Ladies), this Vancouver-based band was around before many of the aforementioned musical terms were coined, and will likely endure even more such attempts at labeling before they are through. Taken in a positive sense, such labels point out both the importance that Skinny Puppy still has for rock music circa 2007, and the inability of critics to pigeonhole their musical output. The forerunner of many musical trends since the appearance of their debut EP Remission in 1984, the Pups made it possible for more commercially successful bands like Nine Inch Nails and Rammstein to exist and flourish, yet have themselves remained an underground phenomenon, with an, ahem, “rabid” cult following whose dedication to the band is unshakeable. And while I’m sure they would have gladly cashed paychecks the size of Trent Reznor’s, on a musical level, the band’s “outsider” status has allowed them to maintain their artistic integrity in a way that stadium-filling acts seldom manage.

The new Puppy album, Mythmaker, is the second since the band (Ogre, vocals, cEvin Key, music) reformed in 2000 (following a break-up in 1995) with a show in Dresden, Germany, going on to issue the album The Greater Wrong of the Right in 2004. Stylistically, Mythmaker displays both continuity with its musical predecessor, as well as some interesting divergences. Both albums showcase a Skinny Puppy that has at once remained true to its original, dark, oppositional vision of contemporary culture and its aggressive, electronic sound, yet also a band that has evolved with the times. TGWOTR admittedly startled some long-time Puppy fans, as both Ogre and Key incoporated elements of their own solo projects (Ogre’s newfound melodic pop sensibility as heard on his OHGR releases, Welt and Sunnypsyop; Key’s developing symphonic, filmic sensibility as heard on projects like The Ghost In Each Room), yet anchored these to traditional Puppy trademarks, such as sampled dialogue from horror films and the irresistible, syncopated doom-beats of days past. The album won over all but the most hardened Puppy heads, and was followed in 2005 by the excellent in-concert DVD The Greater Wrong of the Right Live, in which any doubts about the band’s ability to still deliver a multi-media assault on the senses were quickly dispelled. On the DVD, Ogre stumbles deliriously onstage in an Anubis mask, spitting fake blood and, like a gothic Bill Maher, proceeds to deliver a blistering audio-visual critique of, among other things, the Bush administration, one volatile enough to provoke calls from a group calling itself Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-American Hollywood for a boycott on college radio stations insolent enough to play the band’s music.
Mythmaker takes Skinny Puppy even further into foreign sonic territory: overall, the more immediate feel of TGWOTR is replaced here by an epic, dramatic mentality, one suiting the album’s title. And how to explain to long-time fans that the album’s best track. “Jaher,” is a quiet, ambient piece that features acoustic guitar and snippets of tinkling piano, with Ogre, his voice heavily filtered through a vocoder, chanting the mantra “All life starts with death / All death starts with life”? Which isn’t to imply that this is some mellowing out trip into middle age. Overall, Mythmaker seeks to deconstruct the current cybercultural construct, as Ogre explained in a recent interview:
How we represent ourselves, be it on MySpace or things like that, I find kind of fascinating. This idea of hyperbolized hyper-reality, hyper-realized people. To me, when you meet somebody, you’re not really meeting them, you’re meeting who they really want to be. But now it’s like you’re watching people actually construct these things and continue to update them in a virtual world, and then reading them over and over again and actually believing all of these things about themselves . . . And I’ve seen a lot of people who I just know are not like that, but are presenting themselves in such this hyper-realized way that’s both a tragedy and a comedy.
Hence we have Mythmaker’s ominous lead-off track, “Magnifishit,” which sounds like a requiem for a dying, deluded culture: "I am the maggot's muscle /magnet missile / your mother's pisshole / Magnifishit / the master of it all, oh yeah," sings Ogre, mocking an insecure “cyberculture” which depends on a corporate entity like MySpace for its self-esteem. The song, typical of the album as a whole, builds momentum rather than hitting you between the eyes right off the bat, Similarly, “Haze” is more lyric-based than much of Skinny Puppy’s back catalogue, eschewing hypnotic dance beats for epic grandeur via Key’s electronically conjured atmospherics. Lest the listener fear that the boys have gone soft, however, “Pedafly” might be subtitled,”Trent Reznor, who’s your daddy?,” as it evokes paranoia via jagged synths and pounding drums, while “Politikil” is prime-time Puppy, Ogre adopting the persona of a corrupt politician, dancing while Rome burns, repeatedly asking the essential question “Are you up for a suck?” over music that sounds like it was composed by Giorgio Moroder on an acid trip. “Ugli” finishes things in fine, breathless style, Ogre taking on the born-agains’ sinful relationship with the current White House, chanting the line “Jesus wants to be ugly” over speed-of-light techno rhythms. Guess that warning from Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-American Hollywood didn’t take.
Mythmaker, then, is another step in the continuing evolution of one of the most important and influential bands of the last quarter of a century. Skinny Puppy started its collective life in protest against the policies of Reagan-era conservativism, and sadly, little has changed in the interim between Remission and this current release. If anything, the times have grown much darker over the last twenty-five years, the Clinton years now seeming like an aberration, a temporary disruption of the neo-conservative political continuum. The time was right for Skinny Puppy back in 1982, and the time is right for them in 2007. Ignore their message at your own risk.