AFTER LISTENING to My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult since high school, beginning with their gothy, occult-soaked early records on industrial label Wax Trax, through the electro-sleaze of the Sexplosion! era, all the way up to this year’s Death Threat, I have come to the conclusion that all TKK songs are about one of three things:
(a) lust
(b) danger
(c) lust and danger
When I got the chance to float this theory to the Chicago group’s vocalist and lyricist Groovie Mann, he agreed with me—to a point.
“There’s a fair share of that,” acknowledges Mann. ” I don’t know, I think there’s also stuff that deals with deep melancholy—not necessarily depressing, but sort of dark questions of reality and self-reflection, with drug use and drug abuse and alcohol, you know? It’s a whole collage of what we’re all entwined in our lives. It’s like, ‘This is what’s happening to us; is it happening to you?’ Then we put out our work and people are like, ‘Oh my God, that’s exactly how I was feeling.'”
My initial reaction is to worry about anyone who can relate too much to songs like “A Daisy Chain for Satan” or “Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness.” But Thrill Kill Kult have always explored the dark side of the psyche, especially on their early death-dance releases like 1988’s I See Good Spirts and I See Bad Spirits and 1990’s Confessions of a Knife. The packaging for these records featured spooky photos, cartoons of Satan on a cross, naked women and absolutely no pictures of the band, which especially in a pre-Internet era wound a menacing mystique around a group that at that point was really just the duo of Mann and guitarist-keyboardist Buzz McCoy.
“We kind of started out imageless,” says Mann. “It was just the way we felt about the time. We were nonband, nonimage, sort of over the whole past of that kind of stuff. We went out electronic, and people were like, ‘What?’ I mean, they liked it, but they were confused. It was like, ‘We’re not a band. We’re a happening.'”
Appropriately for a nonband, they hadn’t set out to make music. Instead, Mann and McCoy were planning an artsy, trashy B-movie called My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, but the music was more interesting than the movie.
“We were screwing around with film ideas. But the soundtrack came first, and then we were piecing the movie into it. It was really funny,” he remembers. “We had borrowed somebody’s video camera, and we were shooting all kinds of funny little things, like dripping iodine in the sink. Ugh, just strange stuff.”
After finding a following with the catchy, dark beats of “Kooler Than Jesus,” “And This Is What the Devil Does” and “Days of Swine and Roses,” all of which pointed back to their love of cult movies with cleverly looped dialogue samples (“I live for drugs … it’s great … it’s great … I’m the white rabbit”), Thrill Kill Kult drastically changed on 1991’s Sexplosion!, trading in black magic for black leather on songs like “The International Sin Set,” “Leathersex” and what would become their most popular song, “Sex on Wheelz.”
“It was kind of ‘Enough’s enough. Let’s see who else we are.’ “Some of the fans from the beginning were like, ‘Disco? Ehhhh!'” admits Mann. “But at the same time, we got a lot of new people aboard. We’ve always had so many different kinds of audiences come to see us, it wasn’t one certain type. It was secretaries and teachers and strippers, just a blend. Subsequent releases mined a similar groove, throwing touches of noir crime and retro-hustler cool into the signature aggressive riffs and electronic rhythms.
The group’s tour, supporting both the new album and The Sinister Whisper, a remixed collection of their Wax Trax songs, should combine all the elements of their career. “It’s basically back to the original form of Thrill Kill Kult. Our dark songs, but freshened up,” says Mann.
Whether celebrating lust or danger, or both, what defines all of Thrill Kill Kult’s music is their sheer delight at indulging taboos, toying with symbols and breaking whatever rules they can think of in pursuit of making something unique. “It’s not just a beat and a bunch of samples and catch-phrases. It’s the continuity and the creative craft that goes into it that makes it work—for me, at least. I grew up listening to David Bowie, Alice Cooper and T Rex, all those weird lyrics and characters and personalities that kept drawing people back for more and more, like, who are these people? Are they from another planet? Oh my God, this is the strangest music I’ve ever heard.”
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult
May 26, 9pm, @ The Blank Club, San Jose
