Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * *

There should always be a connection when listening to music, a growing bond and linking association that supports the structure between the soul and the brain; a link that is closely guarded by the music being entertained by both human facets. Sometimes though the link can go wrong, whether the fault of the band for being too clever for their own good and devising an album that doesn’t come across as being nourishment, instead being seen as a mark of audience condoning, or on the part of the listener who half way through the aural experience finds themselves daydreaming of their first musical love, the link for whatever it is worth dies.

Killing Joke’s Pylon is an album that offers so much, that cries out in the middle of the night asking for attention, that requires careful consideration but for whatever reason comes across as the growling withered look of an aged aunt slowly disapproving of your latest hobby, calling it reckless and one that will end it tears. A hobby that should be carrying so much electricity through its veins that the national grid would tapping it for unused potential and yet feels more as if its erring on the static, the mewling muttering of stagnancy and the crippling understanding that for once, the aged aunt is right.

Pylon should be elevated, a structure of songs that dominate the musical landscape and yet songs such as Dawn of The Hive, the misplaced Euphoria and Into the Unknown cancel the charge built up in the tracks War on Freedom and I Am The Virus, the feeling of lack of movement, of consistent hesitancy, of not wanting to let loose completely is enough to know that somewhere the electricity that flows from band to listener is lost, the dynamic is displaced and whilst the album is certainly and unequivocally not one that is steeped in the mire of looking down upon the audience, it has the fixed gaze of one that arguably doesn’t feel as if it wants to be loved.

Pylon unfortunately doesn’t live up to the demand and the prospect of sending the electricity underground into the best forgotten albums of the year an all too close an experience.

Ian D. Hall