Skinny Puppy HanDover

Briefly, as I've only listened to the new SP disc four times, it's growing on me. The opening track, Ovirt, is a terrific shudder of pixels that evokes early-90s gaming memories as wide connotation, not direct reference (far too concrete for the pups, that). Great lyrics, dramatic and exciting.

So far, the rest of HanDover is high quality electronic music, much like cEVIN Key's Download project (check out Helicopter or Wookie Wall EP for recent triumphs) or Mark Walk's work with Ohgr (for whom Ogre is vocalist). I've no problem with this, but it exposes a bias: I didn't mind when Download reflected Puppy (Eyes of Stanely Pain) but, well, now that Puppy has traces of recent Download it seems to muddy the legacy. SP have a very distinct sound, whereas it is easy to copy Frontline Assembly's sound and, actually, sound pretty close to them. Copy Puppy and you sound like a copy. Now, though, (and I'm avoiding canine metaphors as much as I can) the onslaught seems to lack teeth -and I know i'm making an assumption that SP should sound like an onslaught, but prior to the restart, it always had.

Take the dungeon clatter of Smothered Hope. For all it's icy synths, swirling (if sub-zero) melody and popping (if subterranean) beats, it was a punch of sound. Not an easy synth-pop listen. So, even from the beginning, Puppy had been very challenging, forcing you to think and react either due to stylistic shift (see Rabies to Too Dark Park shift) or sheer weight of sound (Last Rights).

This has no weight! Or, it has it craftily redistributed in the form of muscle. There is the occasional flex, a pumping beat, a nasty bassline or soul-draining vocal effect and a couple of wonderful other little glimpses of the creative power this band has.

However, some parts sound merely like Mark Walk has opened his e-mail, seen a track from cEVIN and popped one of his stock Ogre vocals onto it. Cruel, yes...but Ogre rarely seems overwhelmed by the music and the sounds seldom seems to be creating enough of a backdrop for his hysterics (with the exception of aforementioned Ovirt, a Smothered Hope cousin, and the excellent Brownstone).

Puppy no longer deploy their knack for texture and depth. By choice? To sound modern, and leave the suckers with their artificial tape-hiss and 'analogue sound, man' when the Pups are composing soundscapes on their sofas with laptops, not wrestling with chunky wires and 'valves'.

Anyway, I feel i'm being unkind to an unrelentingly superb group...
There isn't a shit track on it, I just have high standards.