Inspired by the groundbreaking music of Chrome, Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Portion Control, The Legendary Pink Dots, and others, Skinny Puppy experimented with electronic recording techniques and methods. the band composed multi-layered music generally using keyboards, synthesizers, found sounds, drum machines, live percussion, tape splices, samplers, and conventional rock music instruments. Whereas many contemporary remixes and re-edits of songs were created in order to make a song more suitable for dancing or different radio formats, Skinny Puppy approached remixing and re-editing as an artistic process of reinterpreting compositions, often using remixes to push their sound into styles of ambient, dub and techno. Skinny Puppy's often informal, improvisational approach to musical composition is indicated by use of the term brap, coined by them and defined as a verb meaning "to get together, hook up electronic instruments, get high, and record".
Skinny Puppy's first two proper releases, Bites and Remission, fall somewhere between the found-sound chaos of early Cabaret Voltaire and the abrasive, futuristic synthpop of the Units or Crash Course in Science. While the intense synth programming, abstract rhythms, and surreal samples--all Puppy trademarks--are present here, the albums owe as much to new wave as to industrial.
A subsequent EP, Chainsaw, featured a remix of Bites's "Assimilate" that earned the band some attention from club DJs. 1986's Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse earned Skinny Puppy greater attention, as "Dig It" and "Stairs and Flowers" became alternative club and college radio hits; the video for the former was played occasionally on MTV. The album is arguably less club-friendly than its predecessors, as the band continues to refine a claustrophobic, almost surreal sound that buries rhythm and melody. The follow-up, Cleanse, Fold, and Manipulate treads similar territory.
VIVIsectVI was a breakthrough for the band, with "Testure" becoming their biggest club hit to date, and the album itself was received warmly by college radio. The title of the album was a pun intended to associate vivisection with Satanism (ie. the "666 sect"). The album shows SP integrating more political and social themes: "Testure" is an animal rights song; "VX Gas Attack" concerns the use of chemical weapons; "State Aid" promotes sexual abstinence to stop the spread of AIDS/HIV.
Ogre had become very interested in Ministry and Al Jougensen's side projects, and he persuaded the rest of the band to allow Jourgensen to produce Rabies. While "Worlock" (a track Jourgensen didn't produce) remains an industrial club classic, the album was received coolly, as many thought Jourgensen's heavy metal guitar-based signatures did not compliment SP's more complex, intricate sonic sculptures. The band briefly disbanded afterward.
They reformed and returned to their electronic roots with Too Dark Park, a hallucinogenic album that owes as much to psychedelia as industrial music. Two years later, "Last Rights" covered similar territory, culminating in the epic sound sculpture "Download." Although their sound had moved away from industrial dance, these albums expanded the band's audience, and provided the template for many industrial bands of the 1990s.
Following "Last Rights", the band, poised for a major breakthrough in the wake of Nine Inch Nails' commercial success, left their longtime label Nettwerk for American Recordings. Their highly anticipated followup was unfortunately marred by personal tragedy - the death of Dwayne Goettel - and the band's inability to agree on a direction for the record. Numerous producers, including Martyn Atkins (PigFace/Invisible Records founder) and Roli Mosimann (Swans), came and went without success; finally the band regrouped with longtime collaborator Dave "Rave" Ogilvie to finish "The Process". The band expanded their range, working with gothic pop and heavy metal, alongside their familiar electronic textures. While seemingly rushed to completion following Goettel's death (it sounds half-finished in parts), it is an interesting change for the group. Unfortunately American Recordings, tired of waiting for the record, did little to promote it. Skinny Puppy broke up afterward.
With interests in filmmaking, they made a number of music videos, each attempting to further the theme and concept of the composition at hand. Most of these videos received little air play by major music video networks such as MTV (USA) and MuchMusic (Canada) and some were outright banned. For example the video for "Worlock" was universally banned because it is a "non stop gore fest" of clips from various horror movies. Because none of these clips were authorized for usage in the video it has never been commercially available.
Their concerts have been marked by their bizarre and bloody conceptual performance art, which for every concert was planned with the intention of challenging the notions of all who observed. Their music had some acceptance in dance clubs because of its danceable beats, but had little play on commercial radio. Skinny Puppy had little commercial success outside of Canada, but their influence on industrial music is immense.
The band began with the intention of doing something "raw" and "real." Ogre's vocals, one of Skinny Puppy's most recognizable features, are typically roughly growled snarls of half-sentences and fragmented stream of consciousness. Lyrical themes included animal rights, politics, religion, horror, drug abuse, disease, and environmental degradation; these themes were often lyrically and conceptually intertwined. Other core aspects of the Skinny Puppy sound include the mixture of heavy sampling and experimental noise with softer musical styles sometimes approaching synthpop.
Post-punk politics are a recurring theme utilised by Skinny Puppy. Some say the meaning of their name is that their music and lyrics give a view of the world from the eyes of a starving animal. They have long had an interest in animal rights; this is most obvious in their song Testure, which is about vivisection and other animal testing being scientific fraud. During many of their concerts Ogre would take the role of "scientist" and experiment on a stuffed animal. In 1988 they were arrested for their mocked-up vivisections, and found it ironic to be arrested for a parody of what was happening for real across the street from their concert. During their TGWOTR tour, criticism of the Bush regime was a recurring theme, particularly during their performance of VX Gas Attack, a song about atrocities perpetrated by Saddam Hussein, originally released while he was still considered an ally of the United States.
The last two studio albums are points of contention for old school Puppy fans. During the recording of The Process, the band broke up. Even more tragically, Dwayne Rudolph Goettel died, from an apparent heroin overdose at his parent's home, soon afterwards. Some people say that cEvin, Nivek, and Dwayne didn't connect as well on this album as they had earlier because their respective musical interests were diverging at the time, others claim it was the heroin.
Key and Ogre later reunited as Skinny Puppy for a one-off concert in Germany in 2003. Afterwards, they decided Skinny Puppy should continue as an ongoing project. The newly reconstituted Skinny Puppy released The Greater Wrong of the Right in 2004, their first studio album in 8 years, and have been continuing since, constantly evolving their sound.
There have been a number of Skinny Puppy side projects, both before, and after the breakup in 1995. The Tear Garden is a collaboration between cEvin and Edward Ka-Spel (and later most band members) of The Legendary Pink Dots. Other noteable side projects include Download, Hilt, Plateau, Cyberaktif (a collaboration between Key & Goettel and Bill Leeb, a.k.a. Wilhelm Schroeder), Rx (one-off collaboration between Ogre and Martin Atkins), ADuck (Goettel's side project), A CHUD Convention (one-off collaboration with a;GRUHM...), Ogre's contributions to Pigface, Ogre and Mark Walk's band ohGr and solo releases from cEvin Key.
Dead of Winter
Skinny Puppy Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
"closer (closer, closer,...)"
It's Christ
It's Christmas eve
October bleak and desolate
There's frost murder in my (???) room
The blood stained windows of night
It's always Christmas here for my dead of winter
I gaze into the (nursery?/rosary?)
I speak where is the vision
(decost?) and pray to priests in the dead of winter
The heart is (felt a?/smelt a?/smells of?) birds out of place
A paradise to call perfection
Theatre, intrigue all fair in the dead of winter
A place to hold you in disguised to live a shack
A memory that's what comedians are for
Reflection, reflection in my heart
The river of (???) swallow them?
To melt them enters love
Dead head dont worry
Become submerged repression (surge?/serve?) the church
Dead of... winter
Winter ...cold
Here sauce is cold cold again again again I
(???)
They think the hot spot (?sent here and then?)
They dont know what its like to live f**k
I'm not against (???) priest (???) hollow (???) dead don't (???)dead love(???)
The lyrics to the Skinny Puppy's song Dead of Winter are cryptic and open to various interpretations, which reveals the band's typical melodramatic and eerie mood. The song describes a bleak, desolate, and cold atmosphere, epitomized by the dead of winter on Christmas Eve. This reference to Christmas Eve underlines the eerie and strange feeling the lyrics convey. The lyrics also mention a "nursery" or "rosary" and the singer "pray[s] to priests in the dead of winter." Here, there might be a sense of longing for comfort and protection, but heaven and religion are not fulfilling. Instead, the singer is left with a sense of foreboding that the winter's cold and emptiness will never go away.
The second paragraph of the song summarizes how the singer is hopeless and lost in winter's emptiness. In the lyrics, the singer feels out of place, and the "heart is felt a smelt smells of birds out of place." It's a paradoxical image that hints at confinement and lack of freedom. Yet, the third paragraph suggests that the singer found a "paradise to call perfection," depicted as a "theatre, intrigue all fair in the dead of winter." This line is somewhat enigmatic, exposing the complexities of the lyrics. Finally, the lyrics mention a "dead head," which might represent the singer's confusion and lack of direction.
Line by Line Meaning
watch closely
Pay attention
closer (closer, closer,...)
Pay more attention
It's Christ
It's Christmas time
It's Christmas eve
It's the night before Christmas
October bleak and desolate
The month is October, and it is bleak and desolate
There's frost murder in my (???) room
There is frost and death in my room
And still the pennies earned
Despite everything, money is still made
The blood stained windows of night
The windows of the night are stained with blood
It's always Christmas here for my dead of winter
Even in the dead of winter, it feels like Christmas
I gaze into the (nursery?/rosary?)
I look into the nursery or rosary
I speak where is the vision
I ask where the vision is
(decost?) and pray to priests in the dead of winter
I pray to the priests in the dead of winter
The heart is (felt a?/smelt a?/smells of?) birds out of place
The heart is filled with misplaced birds
A paradise to call perfection
A perfect paradise
Theatre, intrigue all fair in the dead of winter
All is fair in theater and intrigue during the dead of winter
A place to hold you in disguised to live a shack
A place where you can hide in a disguised shack
A memory that's what comedians are for
Comedians are there to create memories
Reflection, reflection in my heart
There is reflection in my heart
The river of (???) swallow them?
The river swallows them
To melt them enters love
Love enters to melt them
Dead head dont worry
Don't worry, dead head
Become submerged repression (surge?/serve?) the church
Become oppressed and submerged; serve the church
Dead of... winter
Winter becomes dead
Winter ...cold
Winter is cold
Here sauce is cold cold again again again I
The sauce is cold, repeatedly
(???)
Unknown
They think the hot spot (?sent here and then?)
They think this is a hotspot
They dont know what its like to live f**k
They don't know what it's like to experience sex
I'm not against (???) priest (???) hollow (???) dead don't (???)dead love(???)
I am not against hollow, dead priests, but don't love them
Contributed by Brooklyn B. Suggest a correction in the comments below.
szalab agomat
Probably my all time favorite intro of any song ever! The first 2 minutes could have easily been 2 songs on their own.
Spaceman Spliff
I totally agree. I always wished they’d have made a song using the sound from the intro.
Golz
I found this CD in a “CDWAREHOUSE” in 2001 and blasted it on my parents soundsystem while they were at work. Good times ☝🏻😾
RUINS
Haha, I would do the same while skipping class and rushing home to blast this!
C. Foster
ha ha my sentiments exactly. CD warehouse--best bargains on flimsy plastic discs sought after feverishly by roughly 6,000 people per state.
Sylvie P.
Their early stuff was awesome...And still is.Great band.
john turtle
rtyna find that back and forth mixtape
Briokids
this is still blowing my mind over 14 years after i heard it and almost 25 years since it was made.
Matina Stamatakis
Holy hell...this is sick! I've never heard this song before today, and I've been a SP fan for many years. Amazing. Thanks!
mike otte
I was bangin this in early 90's..will never get old!!!