[kj] Music review: Killing Joke (The Scotsman)

Paul dubecho at gmail.com
Sat Nov 10 10:46:54 EST 2018


https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/music/music-review-killing-joke-1-4827089

*Music review: Killing Joke*

[image: scotsman-jaz.jpg]
Frontman Jaz Coleman and Killing Joke have anthems for us. Picture:
RMV/REX/Shutterstock

Published: 09:00
Saturday 10 November 2018

ARE they soothsayers? Or merely evergreen purveyors of timeless
geo-political anthems? Either way, Killing Joke have a song for every
occasion.

Barrowland, Glasgow ****

“Are you enjoying Brexit?” inquired frontman Jaz Coleman with a glint in
his eye, as a prelude to unleashing their 1981 single Follow the Leaders,
while his own ambivalence towards the EU was evident in European Super
State, a trancey industrial anthem – because all Killing Joke songs are
anthems at heart – with jagged interjections from guitarist Geordie, whose
casual brilliance remains a dynamic foil for Coleman’s wired derangement.

Killing Joke don’t need an occasion to justify bringing the fire but it
just so happens that 2018 marks the 40th birthday of a band which has
threatened to pull itself apart on numerous occasions but is now a
thrilling juggernaut cutting a swathe through uncertain times.

The pugnacious punk of Eighties doesn’t sound like any version of the 1980s
we might have been sold since, and a number of other pagan punk numbers
from their early albums served as a reminder that Killing Joke have always
been a band apart, drawing as much from the psychedelic prog rock of
Hawkwind as the animalistic fury of punk.

With fuel to spare, they treated the middle of their set like it was the
end with the climactic Labyrinth, then simply regrouped for the intense
turbo charge of Corporate Elect. A superb Love Like Blood was dedicated to
their late bassist Paul Raven and the epic shamanic metal of Pandemonium
pushed this latest vital dispatch to a mighty crescendo.

FIONA SHEPHERD
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