Wax Trax!: My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult.

And our Wax Trax! week continues. Moving along, moving along ...

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult (or TKK, if one doesn't care to type all that out over and over again, such as yours truly) began life in 1986 when Frankie Nardiello, lighting technician for Ministry's Twitch tour (damn, what a great album that was!), sat down with Al Jourgensen himself and wrote a few songs for an independent film he wanted to make. Nothing much came of the collaboration, but one of the songs, "Thrill Kill Kult," sparked his imagination. He ended up hooking up with his buddy Marston Daley and started piecing together his ideas for the film, which he wanted to call Hammerhead Housewife and the Thrill Kill Kult. (Goddamn, I would have loved to have seen that film.) While the movie itself never got made, the soundtrack they had recorded for it proved to have such an appealing quality to it that Wax Trax! Records took note and released it as an EP (WAX 039) in 1988. Voilá, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult was born.

Nardiello changed his name to Groovie Mann, and Daley changed his to Buzz McCoy, and they named their new band after their first EP, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. Their debut full-length album, I See Good Spirits and I See Bad Spirits, followed shortly after, and the rest, as they say, is history. Some Have To Dance ... Some Have To Kill, Confessions ... Of A Knife, Sexplosion!, 13 Above The Night, and many more albums and EPs were to follow - TKK is still busy recording, touring, and spreading their nasty, sleazy, psycho-sexual disco mayhem all over the place.

I would like to showcase today one of their strongest tracks, off of their 1990 sophomore album Confessions of a Knife... (WAX 7089), the one and only "A Daisy Chain 4 Satan." That's one thing I've always loved about TKK - their usage of satanic images and phrases in their music. True, the lyrics themselves were never terribly overt in their blasphemy, but that didn't stop the right-wing Christian groups from despising TKK. Which is just fine with me - it's fun to piss those people off.

Here are two versions of "A Daisy Chain 4 Satan." The first is probably the most WTF - full of violence, nudity, debasing sexual acts, and, yes, Satan His Own Bad Self. Did I mention that it's NSFW? Oh, hell yes it's NSFW. But enjoy. The version of the song is the one that appears on the album. The second version is essentially the edited version (cut down to 4:20, haha), and the video is taken from a bunch of those old educational videos from the 60's and 70's. "I live for drugs, I live for drugs ... it's great, it's great." Which video do you prefer? Let me know!

my life with the thrill kill kult

"a daisy chain 4 satan"

confessions of a knife...

Happy Hump Day!

picture: bonobos.com

Well hello there, people. It's Wednesday, which means that it's officially Hump Day. Yep, we're officially past the half-way mark to the next weekend - so bully for us! We here at the Second Drawer Up corral would like to take a moment to celebrate this ridiculously named moment in time and honor it the only way we really know how - with electronic music, of course! And look - we brought some sexy! Get it? Hump; sex? Haha, we're clever little bonobos, and on this day of the Norse god Odin (also known as Woden or Woten), we're going to share with you a couple of songs you may or may not be aware of that have to do with ... you guessed it, sex.

Roll that beautiful sex footage!

First up in our day's roster is an interesting little piece called "People Are Still Having Sex," by LaTour. Recorded in 1991 by William "Bud" LaTour, a successful voice-over actor, electronica artist and parody musician from Lowell, Massachusetts, this clever and rather catchy number was essentially a call for sanity during a period of time where AIDS was being used as a political tool by conservative fuckwits who wanted to press an agenda of abstinence (sound familiar?). The message then was the same as it is now: Abstinence education doesn't work, people. But the song? Pretty damn clever. Favorite spoken-word lyric: "When you see them holding hands, they're making future plans to engage in the activity - do you understand?" And here it is:

Second on our scintillating list is "Mystery Babylon" from My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. Taken from the Chicago, Illinois industrial collective's 1991 album Sexplosion!, this is a sprawling and deviously subversive piece, with its lilting jazzy piano, horns, and a distinctive Zydeco-influenced vest frottoir running throughout whilst a singsong-y chorus with breathy female voices goes on about sexual providence and passion. The song is interwoven with a running spoken conversation between a horny john and a couple of hookers. Best exchange: "What goes for ten dollars?" "Well, whaddaya want for ten dollars?" "I want something different, I want something special." "Ah no, honey, not for ten bucks."

Last and thirdly on our triptych of hanky panky is a song that just about every human being on the planet has probably heard at least once - but man, what a great freaking song it is. I'm speaking, of course, of "Strangelove" by the one and only Depeche Mode. Martin Gore's synth anthem to BDSM after spending a huge amount of time in Berlin's leather clubs and bars is just as cheeky, playful, and brilliant now as it was back in 1987 when it was released as the first single of their monumental album Music For The Masses. Sadly, WMG are being fucking pricks and have disabled embedding on all their videos (the kick-ass Anton Corbijn version is what I would have liked to have shown you, but oh well), so here's Dave, Martin, Andrew, and Alan "performing" "Strangelove" on a German television show in 1987. Enjoy!

So there you have it, pleasant and loyal readers. Happy Hump Day - and may all your ups and downs take place in your bed of choice. Ciao!