Pop Reviews : Skinny Puppy Seeks Higher Purpose

Skinny Puppy’s Nivek Ogre, wearing a succession of costumes that looked like huge, exterior tumors, lurched around the Hollywood Palladium stage as he sang, “extracting” his entrails and otherwise encouraging blood to spurt.

Ogre periodically spun a revolving rack and interacted with what looked like hanging slabs of meat or severed limbs or dead babies, then crossed the stage and inserted his head in a kind of science-lab helmet for a good cleaning (results shown on the big video screen). The Vancouver trio’s two instrumentalists accompanied the proceedings with a clamor of drums and synthesizers that was more like a symphonic unit than a series of rock songs.

Skinny Puppy is a pioneer of the industrial-rock genre, but it has managed to remain somewhat outside the industrial mainstream, playing a less dance-ready brand of the style and hammering home its views on social issues, primarily vivisection (they’re against it).

The new album “Last Rights” and the current tour seem to branch out thematically (the press kit says it’s a version of Rimbaud’s “Season in Hell”), but anyone going in cold would have been hard-pressed to tell what was going on at the Palladium. Ogre sang many words, but few were decipherable, and the staging tended to repeat the same devices without establishing clear dramatic line.

Skinny Puppy obviously holds to a higher purpose than superficially similar shock-rockers GWAR and other Alice Cooper’s offspring, but this display of slime and pain didn’t communicate much beyond the broadest strokes.