Mythmaker - Dark Publications

Location: Home » music » General » Mythmaker

Similar Items:

•	Year Zero
•	The Greater Wrong of the Right
•	Fallout
•	Nine Inch Nails Live - Beside You in Time [Blu-ray]
•	The Greater Wrong of the Right Live

Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com
Some are calling Mythmaker Skinny Puppy's most ambitious--and accessible--album ever. That may be sheer hyperbole but it is safe to say that Mythmaker may be the strongest SP disc in some time. Many of the songs prove infectious--particularly the opening "Magnifishit," the atmospheric "Haze" and even the stomping "Pedafly." The group gets darker and more experimental with "Politikil," pauses for something different ("Ambiantz") and closes with the ultrafast "Ugli." For the most part, the record succeeds, but there are a few bum notes: "Lestiduz" serves a noodly bridge between two better, more focused tunes; "Jaher" is a mellow drifter that will probably polarize some listeners. However there's nothing that will prevent fans--both new and old alike--from growing the continuously evolving myth surrounding Skinny Puppy. --Jedd Beaudoin

Album Description
The planet's leading industrial gurus are back with Mythmaker - their most ambitious release to date! As torchbearers of the early industrial scene, the revered Skinny Puppy have had a profound effect on modern music. While their incredible influence on the past and present is undeniable, their greatest days are straight ahead. Mythmaker - as dark, beautiful, twisted and angry as always - takes the listener on a rollercoaster ride through their industrial/techno/prog world and delivers one of the most riveting listening experiences of the year. This is the definitive statement of the definitive Industrial ensemble. Look for the Skinny Puppy song politikiL to be featured on Jackass - The Video Game out March 2007!

Customer Reviews: Read 46 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

The next evolution of the Puppy Twins February 6, 2007
35 out of 39 found this review helpful

Times change and people change. Everyone has a favorite band(or two) that has left behind a defining sound to try explore new horizons. Skinny Puppy are no different. We should be so glad that we can get the type of variety out of one band in a world(now)filled with banal, boring, and simply generic label-manufactured bands. I have listened to the Puppy all my life and I have rolled with the changes and losses( RIP Dwayne). I think change is necessary to stay relevant. How could a band be less relevant by changing when indeed time is also contantly changing?

Anyway, the newer Puppy sound is definitley more modern electronic to be sure. Although, what has not change(and shouldn't) is their core sound. The dark and grim atmospherics are still there. I do miss the horror film samples that I had fun figuring out which film they came from, but the lush complexities in the newer production style gives Mythmaker an epic feel. I notice also an Aphex Twin-esque influence with the trip-hop break-beats. The electronic drums have become WAY more intricate and varied which I think is a good thing. The beats will dance all around your head with this record. The melodicness is also great especially when paired with SP's usual dark themes. There is mild sampling on this album, but obviously not as much as past efforts. Most notable is the sample from Body Snatchers in Dal. Ogre's voice is distorted more than ever, and certainly more than his solo project, but its is more of a robotic distortion and less a monsterous one like the Puppy of old. To make a long story short, if you are a die-hard Skinny Puppy fan from way back AND also have an open mind then you will enjoy this album thoroughly. This is a great album filled with lush soundscapes and production, killer dark synth lines and the usual disturbing and violent lyrical imagery. Please don't even bother comparing this to past releases. This is 2007, not 1988. It is a modern Puppy, but this Puppy (bites) hard and doesnt let go until 48 mins later. Ogre and cEvin have done well. A must-have for true SP fans. Totally worth repeated listens.

5 out of 5 stars

backwArds sigh... February 16, 2007
14 out of 19 found this review helpful

I was strangely inspired when I had read some of these reviews particularly the negative one's suggesting that the band had created this album simply for the money which I'm quite sure is not the case...however I felt challenged to attempt to detach myself a bit and try to break down exactly why I love this album. It's hard for me to articulate exactly why I like something, especially when it comes to music. I may appreciate an art form, for example in photography, I am able to appreciate the technical work of Ansel Adams, and I do see the beauty in his work however, I connect more with the portraits captured by Mary Ellen Mark.

I can't explain or describe why I enjoy or do not enjoy certain types of music and I do enjoy many genres. I'm not one who can pinpoint technical aspects of music and how it is created and why that makes it amazing, or not. I am able to say simply if I like it or not. Do I connect?

On the subway today I had a little Skinny Puppy festival on my iPod, in which I listened to songs from each of their albums. I attempted to personally detach from the music to give it a completely objective and technical overview but I gave up because, well, it's just not my style. I'm not a technical person. I'm fond of emotional connections.

I began with Bites, which took me back to my rebellious high school days. This was 20 years ago amidst days when my friends and I would burn and wave clove cigarettes (but not smoke them) in my car before school so that we would smell like them because that's what the cool kids at the punk shows & new wave parties smelled like. That was the time of vinyl and mix tapes. This was the time before Hot Topic & iTunes. Is there a more beautiful song than "The Centre Bullet" in existence? For me? No. "The Choke", I turn to when I'm having a bad day, I listen to it loudly.

And Remission, "Smothered Hope" felt like my life at the time. The music, obscurely bouncy and words that seemed to capture my exact state of mind with dark thoughts of withered ropes and "why don't you care?" and how the song "Incision" made me physically attempt a backwards sigh which, made me, gasp...and I wondered if that's what it was supposed to do. Solemn ponder wander...this was the coolest music I had ever heard thanks to Mtv's 120 minutes.

And well, Mind: TPI saved my life. I must have lifted the needle on my turntable about a million times to replay the song "Three Blind Mice". "Dig it", you ask? This was the very first Skinny Puppy song I'd ever heard. It was sort of like a merging of everything I was listening to at the time, Depeche Mode, New Order, Joy Division, Alien Sex Fiend Bauhaus and Sex Gang Children. Skinny Puppy stole my heart.

I won't break down each album here on this review but I'd like it to be known that I was an avid follower. (OK and I must admit that I was a little obsessed for a bit, but in my defense, I was not the only one. This band has hooked many people.)

So clearly I'm an old school fan, almost from the very beginning but I would be honest and say so if I didn't like their new stuff.

When I bought TGWOTR, I was strangely nervous that I wouldn't like it and I loved it and still love it, however I must say that Mythmaker has something more, at least for me. It's not a strength of mine to describe music. I'm drawn to the beautiful and sad tracks like "Haze" "JaHer" and "Pasturn", which are appealing to my partially Melancholic Personality.

I feel that as musical artists, over the years Skinny Puppy has always moved forward with their work. I enjoy and appreciate the musical and lyrical change. All of their work appeals to my auditory sensibility and inspires me in one way or another whether by way of encouraging me to learn more about animal experimentation or addiction or politics or psychology and behavior or to paint a world the music takes me to or to simply just enjoy. And of course I always look forward to seeing the live shows, which are in a whole other category of creative genius.

Skinny Puppy touches on many levels. I suggest this album if you are an old school fan or a newly intrigued listener.

5 out of 5 stars

Jesus wants to be Ugli January 31, 2007
13 out of 15 found this review helpful

Skinny puppy is back with another blast of amazing music! I have been a huge fan of Skinny puppy for many years now, and anyone who likes the newer, and more danceable sound of their previous album, "The Greater Wrong of the Right", should immediately find this CD enjoyable. I realize there are a lot of people out there who wish Skinny Puppy was still releasing albums like "Too Dark Park" or "Last Rights", but even though I am a huge fan of their earlier work their more recent work hasn't disapointed me one bit. I find "Mythmaker" and "Greater Wrong of the Right" to be more similar to ohGr's solo albums than earlier Skinny Puppy albums, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Both Sunnypsyop and Welt were amazing solo albums that displayed ohGr's ability to produce more melodic music while at the same time still feeling like an offshoot of Skinny Puppy. I feel it's unfair for people to compare the newer sound of Skinny Puppy from their last 3 albums to terrible bands like Linkin Park. In my eyes Skinny Puppy has never released a bad album, and "Mythmaker" is no exception.

4 out of 5 stars

The Dog Walks Among Us March 11, 2007
12 out of 12 found this review helpful

The Kevins (Ogilvie and Crompton, aka Nivek Ogre and cEvin Key respectively) have been making music for the better part of my life. For twenty-five years, dance floors have shaken and PA systems have whined and protested under the assault that Skinny Puppy launches with their work. In 2004, The Greater Wrong of the Right took me by surprise. At the time of the CD release, the band had been essentially defunct for the better part of thirteen years. Rumors had circulated through the club scenes and across the "better to doubt it than to believe it" discussion forums of the online community-at-large that Key was working with Ogre and Mark Walk on the tour supporting OhGr's SunnyPsyOp as a drummer.

That rumor turned out to be true. Not too long afterwards, a new Skinny Puppy release was locked in the sweaty-handed death grip of my thick, troll-like fingers.

A tour followed - a long tour, all things being equal - and then all that we thirty-somethings who were still clinging to the resurrected legend of Skinny Puppy could hope for was that the new Puppy release was not a singular event. With the 2007 release of Mythmaker, my fears related to the singularity have been assuaged.

The Greater Wrong of the Right was a glimpse through the keyhole at the musical and sonic evolutions that Key and Ogre have experienced in their time away from one another. The sound was familiar, but it was markedly different. This was to be expected. Both artists had grown and had found their respective levels of comfort with their art forms in the time it took them to reinvent their respective identities outside of Skinny Puppy. Thirteen years later, two very different people got back together and reinvented the outfit that, for many people, was the definitive example of North American industrial music.

Mythmaker, while affording Key and Ogre their individualism as musician and artist and possessing the "updated" sound of the current iteration of Skinny Puppy, reaches back in time. Back into the closets. Back down into some of the hidden holes and shallow graves that the band had dug with their bare hands back in the day when they began pioneering away from Winnipeg and into the faces of the rest of the world, changing the meaningless term of "post-punk" into the force to be reckoned with genre of modern industrial music.

The vocal similarities between Too Dark Park and Mythmaker cannot be denied. Ogre is at his personal best for this effort. Key's music is stunning regardless of the vehicle he chooses to deliver it... but he has never been as impressive with his side-projects and solo efforts as he has been when he is composing the sounds that are the spinal column of Skinny Puppy. Mythmaker is no exception, and the music he has delivered with this effort is easily a toe-to-toe match for his critically acclaimed solo works such as The Dragon Experience and The Ghost of Each Room.

The movie samples are back (I caught at least one from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"), and while there is some filtering and production on Ogre's vocals throughout various tracks, they are vastly less harsh and than they have been on past albums where his vocals were rendered inaudible for all intents and purposes. The production and direction of Ken Marshall is absolutely top notch stuff, and Puppy has not sounded quite THIS GOOD in a long time. There just are not any disappointing tracks on this CD. Even the tracks that seem forgettable at first will grow on the listener over the course of three or four complete spins of the disc.

Everything just kind of seems to come together, seamlessly in fact, throughout the ten tracks of Mythmaker. This is one of those Puppy releases that you pop into your player, and before you know it... it's over. Every track compliments the next, hearkening back to the era of Too Dark Park and Last Rights... but with the overall maturity of sound inherent to The Greater Wrong of the Right.

As I said in the beginning, Skinny Puppy has been making music for the better part of my life. At thirty-five, I'm pretty far removed from the club scene and from the majority of the live shows that I'd like to see. I have a child, a wife and a career now, and while music used to be my obsession - something that came first and foremost in my life - I'm not even sure that it is in the top ten of my current lists of priorities. But when I hear Mythmaker, I feel young again. I feel like I did when I discovered Skinny Puppy for the first time. That is an absolutely fantastic feeling.

I won't be missing this tour.

The Dog is resurrected and walks among us again.

Long live Skinny Puppy.

3 out of 5 stars

It's OK, but nothing like pre-Process creativity... April 1, 2007
12 out of 19 found this review helpful

I am a long, long time fan of Skinny Puppy just like the majority of the reviewers here. For me, just like Greater Wrong of the Right, I keep giving this album a fair couple of listens, but I'm not immediately overwhelmed like I was with Mind TPI or Last Rights.

As a whole it seems very linear and formulaic, unlike the incredible collage work of previous years. The tracks really feel like average "songs": Build ups, somewhat silly chorus lines, etc. No elements of tension or discord, no avant-garde or clever sample use, and most of all I don't need my imagination for this album. I really appreciate the Ain't It Dead Yet album and video for setting moods like that... However, from the way the songs on Mythmaker start, I already know how they will end in formula. Uncharacteristic of SP.

SP must evolve, and I will keep buying albums, but the new albums really are comparable to other groups and other sounds, which surprises and saddens me. It's time to move on, but I miss the collage and dreamlike atmosphere that put them above the rest.

P.S. The Bodysnatchers sample on Dal is great, but Witchman beat them to it a few years back in his track Red Demon Loco on Heavymental...I guess it's a popular sample.

Powered by Associate-O-Matic