Pop Music : Skinny Puppy Offers Alienating Spectacle

Skinny Puppy, an uncommonly popular death-disco band from Vancouver, plays dance music that nobody dances to and bellows gloomy manifestoes that no one understands. All beat, light and nightmarish distortion, a Skinny Puppy concert can be one of the most profoundly alienating spectacles in rock. Friday’s show at the Palladium felt like a brutal slasher-movie killing drawn out to the point of insensateness.

On the backlit, fog-enshrouded stage, mask-wearing vocalist Nivek Ogre moaned, whirled a flail over his head, cringed from the proscenium as if he were starring in a particularly claustrophobic Beckett play. The drummer thrashed away from behind a thicket of gnarled twigs; the keyboardist pounded out power-guitar sounding figures. Screens flashed slides of disembodied body parts and endless blurry videos.

The music itself was kind of monochromatic stuff, circa-1984-era electro-hop beats amplified to the threshold of pain, relieved occasionally by a horror-movie soundtrack texture or a tinkly sequenced synth figure, though never by a melody or an actual riff. Death-disco colleague Ministry might leaven its performances with humor, Revolting C with some actual rock ‘n’ roll. Skinny Puppy’s show is as bleak as the world it describes.