Skinny Puppy’s The Process had been out 6 years by the time I first heard it. In the back corner of the aging, double-level Jelly’s Records and Books, I asked the guy at the front desk to throw it on the overhead system - which, at the time, was the only way to test a CD you wanted to buy. He skipped the first track, “Jahya,” which had a more ambient intro. He’d heard this one before. Spiky, black, hard-edged, it started.
In 1996, when The Process was released, a lot of reviewers didn’t know what to make of it. Nu Metal was on the rise: Deftones had just released Adrenaline and Korn’s sophomore album, Life is Peachy, would come out later that year. American Recordings, for which The Process would be Skinny Puppy’s debut release, were riding high on the success of artists like Slayer, Danzig, and Sir Mix-a-lot (who all had big albums out between 1994 and 1996). Fans were reportedly outraged at the “new direction” and polish of The Process - not to mention the news that this would be the final Skinny Puppy record (so they thought).
discogs.com image of The Process CD edition
Between initial recording and final mixing, long-time member Dwayne Goettel died due to complications with drug addiction. The album is dedicated to him. It’s difficult as a listener to separate the heavy themes of the album, the struggle in its creation, and what the remaining band members (who at the time were not talking to each other) must have been going through.
It’s important to note, but not dwell on, that the band had a lot of issues with their new record label and new management. While this had a lot to do with the building tensions at the time, it was part of a much larger puzzle that this review isn’t interested in. Through the Wikipedia entry for The Process, you can find extensive interviews and sources if you want to know more about this period.
The band reformed in 2000, beginning again as a strictly work-based relationship, but cEvin Key and Ohgr had different feelings about The Process. Key, while feeling it was their heaviest album to date, felt that its direction was arbitrary at times and was frustrated with the way tracks came together based largely on a vision Ohgr had and didn’t share clearly with the music-producing members (Key and Goettel). Ohgr stated, in this archived interview from 1995, “[The Process] remains a testament and should provide an interesting ending.” But for me it was just the beginning.
When I was ten years old, we moved to Hawaii and left whatever friends I had in Oregon behind. I was excited (I was ten). With me, though, I took a few precious burned CDs from the other weird kid in my neighborhood. Tool’s Undertow and Marlyn Manson’s Holywood (which I had misspelled in Sharpie to read: “Hollywood,” something I still think about in those early morning moments). Somehow, also, I had conned my dad into ordering Ministry’s The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste from Columbia House (based solely on the cover). Filth Pig was also in the catalog, but would have been a harder sell. So I was no stranger to a heavy guitar riff and some particularly depressing lyrics. But Skinny Puppy was something different. Listening back now, it would be a sound I would chase in many of the bands I considered very dear to my high school years: Cinema Strange, Wumpscut, Stabbing Westward. It lived somewhere between death rock, nu metal, and industrial. The band, which was deeply ingrained in the early history of Vancouver Industrial, was now shipped off to California by the record label to find a sound that both captured what made them popular but also what the label wanted.
The Process was an album thematically inspired by The Process Church of the Final Judgement, which filters Ohgr’s cut-up-style lyrics - about politics, animal rights, and environmental degradation - through the cult’s philosophy. While this is sometimes apparent in the lyrics, I found, after watching the documentary Sympathy For the Devil? The True Story of The Process Church of Final Judgement by Neil Edwards, that there aren’t a lot of direct references to The Process Church. Perhaps, in many ways, a thematic influence is used to deploy a kind of tribute to the topics and means by which The Process Church talked about the world - often focusing on controversial subjects with a psychological bend towards self-awareness. Ohgr seems to go into, at times, a religious trance much closer to what you’d imagine a southern Baptist speaking-in-tongues sermon sounds like.
From Cvlt Nation’s article on The Process Church
There is, though, a tension in the music and lyrics that you could see as a parallel to the antics of The Process Church, which is to say shock and mystery - purple-lined cloaks, Satan’s Cavern Cafe, a theatrical Black Mass. Early era industrial and performance artists would have loved the scenery. Horror movie showings, dark-cloaked rituals, handsome tall men with little goatees. Robert De Grimston. Black on Black.
Primarily through their magazine, The Process Church revelled in shock and counterculture philosophical investigations of what were, at the time, budding changes to psychology and philosophy. They were primarily concerned with the idea of there being different assets inside of all of us, to which we have to take responsibility. Some people were more aligned with their luciferian tendencies, while others shifted towards Jehovah. This, with the outward message that we must join Christ and Satan to end the world, when seen philosophically instead of religiously, can simply be about exploring transcendence. Not literal, not heavenly, but personal.
From this, we could guess that Ohgr was trying to reflect his own current societal issues and politics, in 1994, in the way that they were in the late 1960s. Subliminal messaging, propaganda, The West Memphis Three.
There has always been a drug-addled, mentally unfit quality to cut-up style writing. Whenever I read it, I both understand and fail to understand its appeal. Skinny Puppy is notorious for using this kind of masked vs. direct meaning in their albums, but through the filter of The Process Church of the Final Judgement, I think the messages are too unstable. Part satire, part self actualization, part judgement, and part shock imagery, the lyrics fail to find a cohesion.
Perhaps the most clear dilation on The Process Church’s method comes from “Amnesia”: “When adding no result / time’s a shallow digging through the mud / thrown out, so expendable / Intentions not up front / and the shit that’s never faced / reflects the sliver of god’s face / and looped / a flaw rotates forever unresolved.” Part self-help wisdom, part religious meaning. Time is expendable. A mistake rotates, looped over and over again in your mind, forever unresolved. These are the kinds of lyrics that, at twelve or thirteen, you can pick and choose from to make a twisted psychology. A corrupt meaning to the antagonism you are already, somehow, fostering for religion and society and death.
At any moment I can recite to you all the lyrics from “Cult,” flawlessly, because I played it so often. There’s something so perfectly sad about the way the song was laid out. Musically, it’s by far the saddest song in Skinny Puppy’s catalog for me. “Killing Game” comes close, of course, but has a different, less personal sadness. A subtle bass-heavy piano plays under the verse and a rising, momentary clip of violins boost the lyrics into a space of core emotion. By the climax, the intense emotional vulnerability comes to a head in many voices: “crescent moon, I’m cutting through,” one voice says while another yells “she’s the one I live for. I live alone. I live alone.” And no matter where I am, I feel it. “Burns inside, horribly. She lifts me to the spirit burns, the darkest hours. My corrupt brain is hurting. Once again, the door lies quiet. Left alone, I’m thinking of her. Sitting the burning clock of time.”
Then, I start the track over.
It so clearly spoke to me when I was thirteen, that now, at thirty-two I’m still whispering it quietly to myself whenever I know I’m about to go into a sad period. When depression is at the door, “Cult” is there to smother myself with; and that’s comforting. It brings to surface that hurt teenage hopeless romantic that lives problematically inside of me, still. Much like Nine Inch Nail’s “Hurt,” I believe this track is an all-time bummer. But it’s not alone on the album. “Amnesia,” which comes later and is much more energetic, shares this certain painstaking sadness. Buried in the looped scale and the deeply dynamic bass line, is a classical minor streak, which runs just under the surface. Songs like “Candle,” “Amnesia,” and “Cult” remind the listener: the edge is always near. The abyss waits below and it’s just as dark as you remember. Then finally, with “Cellar Heat” we are back where we started. The ambient tape loops from “Jahya” start again and closure has come, full circle.
There are good albums in the more recent half of the band’s history, but for me it never quite gets back to the raw trauma that is so well embodied in this album. Through personal tragedy, through social tragedy, and through environmental tragedy, this album was brought somehow into the world, and I am thankful for it immensely as a fan. But I would never want anyone to go through that period again.
Rest in Peace Dwayne.
discogs.com image of The Process CD edition
Skinny Puppy’s The Process is my favorite Skinny Puppy album. For nostalgia reasons. For personal, deeply connected reasons. But also because it’s damn good. You can find it at your local used music store, or here on YouTube. (Note: This album is not available for digital purchase easily. You can find it on Apply Music and Amazon for digital purchase.)