Skinny Puppy – Weapon

It's still not the same music like best SP period (everything until "Last Rights" included), but it's surely their best album since 1992. Better than "The Greater Wrong Of The Right" which has also interesting tracks. But "Weapon" is more coherent. About synths and vocoders, it sounds modern, too much clean, so the result is still less dark and creepy than before. There's almost no feeling of new wave/industrial styles except on tracks "gLowbeL" and "Solvent". Maybe the remix of this last one was not necessary as it brings nothing new; Original song was nice enough. Maybe now, it sounds as what SP expected on "Remission"...
So best track here is "gLowbeL" for me, it represents very well SP's industrial until 1985, like their old hit "Far Too Frail". Long synth wave modulation for the melody and Oger has recovered what I've always called his cavernous gnome's voice.
The "classic" track her is surely B3 "tsudanama". I can feel an attempt to make a track like a mix of "Spasmolytic" and "Choralone" (same ending for this track); Same construction, but the electronic sounds are like a 16bits videogame, which produces a strange (interesting) result. So if you don't know what made the SP "legend" and you like this track, you will surely enjoy the 1989 - 1992 period.
Other best tracks are "ParagUn", "Survivalisto", "Wornin' ", even if it's surprising to hear "dance" tracks from SP; They define probably their new style. "Pro-test" was already like these ones.
Conclusion, this album brings me hope for the next to come.

Skinny Puppy are hardly ever easy to listen to. There may be a handful of great albums that grabbed you first go but most of them make you work for it. This is a welcome stripping back to brass tacks for one of the primo second wave acts and does not go astray. Best SP album since The Process - and more importantly the most up-to-date SP album for the times! Has me bouncing all over the lounge and the vinyl pressing is grand.

There is a 2013,1st pressings ?, manufactured in the Czech Republic (MET 870) that the side A inner label is red.
Matrix / Runout (A): 142473E1/A
Matrix / Runout (B): 142473E2/A
The one of this page is manufactured in Holland (see label).

Skinny Puppy doing Synthwave before it was cool! Legendary, I tell you. Especially considering how Synthwave labels are fraud and milking your brains out with the same sounds over and over again!

This album was, Afterall, Way ahead of time. Only now was this found out!

Watch out! From best as I can see, you can't tell the difference of a sealed cover between the limited to 1000 - 2013 vinyl release and the limited to 600 - 2016 vinyl reissue. However, the side A inner label on the 2013 pressing is blue where the the 2016 repress side A inner label is red and the matrix run outs are different.

Pre-order these at Metropolis' website for $18 before they're all gone!

The selling policy with this LP was totally ridicolous! I hope there will be a second pressing in the future?

This sounds unreal, easily on par with my original copies of Bites/Remiss. Clean out of the sleeve with full clarity and dynamics, it's all there and fills the room with sound effortlessly, never tiresome. Has me even more psyched for the upcoming reissue of GROTR...really hope there is a Weapon deluxe edition in the future. Can't wait to see them in February...these guys really are still the best at what they do and apparently Furnace knows how to press a record, you can't go wrong with Holland.

A reasonably good album, but not all is great. Wornin' is pretty "ehh", Survivalisto has this goofy bass synth line that I really dislike, but stuff like Paragun, the redux of Solvent, and Illisit are all worth it.

"The idea for Weapon, although it might seem timely to people seeing it advertised as a new Skinny Puppy album, actually came into fruition during the tour in 2011. We’d met a Guantanamo guard, a kid who was an MP who was shipped off to Guantanamo to become a prison guard basically. He trained for two weeks, and he was a huge Skinny Puppy fan, but while he was there, he heard Skinny Puppy music being used to torture people. So the impetus of the idea was to use Skinny Puppy as a weapon and write a record called Weapon and write it in a way that it could be used as a weapon and used to torture people. We were going to do some information requests and ask for papers or references on what frequencies they use, what was most effective, and we were even going to go the full nine yards and even release an instruction manual with the album on how to use the album to torture people. That would be followed with a tour that will incorporate aspects of the interrogation techniques onstage…"

Quoted from Ogre himself in this interview:

http://regenmag.com/interviews/skinny-puppy-wielding-new-weapons/

very interesting indeed.