SKINNY PUPPY - Too Dark Park LP

In Alan Moore's "Watchmen" Adrian Veidt sits in front of hundred TV screens to let his subconscious filter a precise picture of the zeitgeist working its way through all the seemingly random impulses.

That's the feeling you might get when listening to the very best Skinny Puppy records. A digital heaven of quantum mechanical fluctuations and strong sense of meaning looming behind all the aural chaos.

Too Dark Park is the most enjoyable Polaroid picture taken of Skinny Puppy's ever changing mental mind maps. It has the chaos of "Last Rights" even if there's still some time for modest self reflection and the most focused song writing on any of their efforts.

Each song is an island state: "Convulsion" is a claustrophobic strait-jacket journey, "Spasmolytic" a punishing information highway beat down and "Nature's Revenge" wound licking in a flooded nest. Most songs climb on each others' shoulders to be the highlight of the album, but the strength of Too Dark Park is its miracle consistency.

Very few bands or artists made anything remarkable out of the cold war climate or the early 90's take on the apocalyptic panic. The fact that Skinny Puppy did, yet still escaped all recognition when the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson became household names shows that people can handle the truth only in smaller dozes.