ohGr, American Memory Project, Chris Connelly at Double Door
A couple of industrial's elder statesmen return, but are they still relevant?
With all the masks and face paint, we have no idea if this is the same guy who performed as ohGr last night.
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Although it seems like a distant, black-clad, combat-boot-wearing memory now, Chicago in the late ’80s and early ’90s was the epicenter of the then-booming industrial-rock scene. It built up around Wax Trax! Records and Al Jourgensen’s Ministry, but included every major player in the genre at one point or another—including the two artists who took the stage at the Double Door Sunday night, Chris Connelly and ohGr, the solo project of Skinny Puppy’s Nivek Ogre.
By the time Nine Inch Nails broke through in 1994, and as Marilyn Manson cartoonishly appropriated Ogre’s shtick, both the industrial scene and Chicago’s place as its headquarters had faded considerably. But plenty of gothy true believers packed the Double Door to see ohGr tour behind its latest, surprisingly strong Devils In My Details.
One of the axioms of touring bands dictates that the audience always wants to hear the last album, not the new one. Ogre apparently either didn’t believe that or didn’t care: He and his three-piece backing band (including Skinny Puppy’s Mark Walk) ripped through Devils track by track, with little or no rest between songs. Fans expecting to hear anything from earlier ohGr records had to wait until the two encores, and anyone expecting to hear Skinny Puppy has to wait until the next time they come through town.
The choice wasn’t a bad call: Devils is a pretty great album, full of the menacing, mechanized sounds that define Skinny Puppy, but also more organic ones (tuba?) that would never make it on that band’s records. More surprising, though, are the album’s downright poppy songs—relatively speaking, this being Nivek Ogre and all—like “Feelin’ Chicken” and “Timebomb,” which sounded especially melodic, if a little demented, live.
Ogre’s stage show in Skinny Puppy has long been more than a little demented, though he he stripped it down considerably for his solo project. Gone are the copious sticky fluids that usually coat him by the end of each show. In their place was a series of masks. Ogre spent the first two songs facing away from the audience, but with a mask covering his head. That gave way to a mask that covered most of his face, then finally, his face, but decorated with Joker-like face paint. The band performed against a video backdrop projected from the sound booth in the center of the club, though the visuals favored more abstract imagery than the more disturbing footage Skinny Puppy typically uses.
The visuals did make for some confusion before ohGr’s set, though. Flyers for the show advertised only two performers, so when Chris Connelly finished his set, the crowd understandably grew denser in anticipation of ohGr. With Ogre’s long history of multimedia accompaniment to the music, it looked normal when crew members draped a white curtain in front of the stage. The crowd cheered when the images started—again, it seemed like part of ohGr’s set, especially because live musicians behind the curtain accompanied the video. Then it just kept going. And going. And the buzz of anticipation in the audience gave way to a growing sense of confusion. “Is this the show?!” someone yelled from the back at one point.
Well, yes and no: No, it wasn’t ohGr, but yes, it was the American Memory Project, who wasn’t promoted as part of the show. The group’s MySpace page describes it as “a broadcast from the future, a digital archive of a long dead country uneartherd [sic] in a distant era and broadcast back to our time.” In layman’s terms, the AMP takes archival footage and heavily stylizes it, creating a compilation of haunting images, from Native Americans, to old railroad construction, to racism in the early 20th century. A lot of the spoken audio was difficult to decipher in the muddy PA mix, but it was an arresting display—for a while at least. The crowd’s confusion gave way to apathy, and the applause that followed the end of the film probably owed more to the audience’s relief that it was over than to genuine enthusiasm.
Chris Connelly started the night off well, playing alone with an acoustic guitar. Connelly has stayed artistically restless in recent years, exploring post-rock on last year’s The Episodes, and drifting further away from convention on his latest, Forgiveness & Exile. But on stage, it was just Connelly and his guitar, and the grounding served his material well, even when he brought out an old chestnut, “July” (from his unpronounceable 1992 solo album, Phenobarb Bambalam).
Although Connelly and Ogre have drifted in different directions musically, they’re both still relevant artistically. Considering the industrial scene of old no longer exists, and few of its refugees are still around, it was nice to see Ogre in fine form, looking and sounding perhaps better than ever.
