Too Dark Park

After making 1989’s Rabies, Skinny Puppy came close to breaking up, with vocalist Nivek Ogre slipping into the orbit of Ministry/Revolting Cocks mainman (and Rabies producer) Al Jourgensen, and his bandmates cEvin Key and Dwayne Goettel embarking on lower-profile side projects. But they came back together and ultimately released one of their darkest, most uncompromising albums. Too Dark Park is a consistently assaultive, pounding storm of sound that throws layers of distorted noise (synths, guitars, drum machines and decontextualized but still unsettling vocal samples) at the listener, often burying Ogre’s vocals in the dense, ever-shifting mix. The singles “Spasmolytic” and “Tormentor” seem like perverse choices, guaranteed to repel more potential listeners than they entice, while “Grave Wisdom” and “Morpheus Laughing” are somewhat catchier in a Halloween-death-disco sort of way, and “T.F.W.O.” has a thrashy intensity. But this is a hard album to dig into; each of its elements seems deliberately placed in conflict with the others.