Diamonds & Rust: Killing Joke – Hosannas From The Basements Of Hell

[Cover artwork: Inhuman Rearing, by Victor Safonkin]

Sentient Ruin label boss M. talks about his favorite album of all time, which was recently reissued: Killing Joke’s 2006 album Hosannas From The Basements Of Hell.

A note from the author: “English is not my native language, so please excuse any awkward sentences or grammatical errors. I didn’t want anyone to correct or edit this writing too much as it came out from the mind, ‘like the sound of the earth vomiting,’ as Jaz Coleman would say. Thank you for understanding.”

---

Walking With Gods

A good friend of mine recently came over to my house to pick something up, and while we were just standing there in my basement talking and hanging out, they asked me what the record with the “weird cover art” was. I turned around and saw my 2022 remastered edition 2LP white vinyl (Revolver US exclusive) of Killing Joke’s 2006 far too underrated masterpiece, Hosannas From The Basements Of Hell sitting there amongst the “to listen to” pile of vinyl. I also own the blue vinyl original pressing from when the album was first released, but this remastered edition seemed like a decent bargain for an album that… Well, I will get there in a minute. I know my friend’s tastes and exceptional ear well, so it was only natural for me to tell them: “That’s my favorite album of all time. Would you like to hear it?” They said yes, almost surprised by those words, so I put it on the turntable and sat down with them as the room filled with an otherworldly roar that I will never get tired of hearing; and which I will carry to my grave as THEE sonic creation that no matter what happens till I live, will never be dethroned in my mind as the eternal number one. Simply because I can not imagine anything in my mind that could possibly sound any better, huger, majestic, and just awe inducing as this album does to me.

A couple days later my friend messaged me to let me know what a mind-blower it was discovering Hosannas, and thanking me for showing it to them. That’s the recurring pattern that always happens to everyone with this monster. All it really takes to worship this album for the rest of your life is to simply know it exists. And to listen to it. And I feel like that has been one of the small callings in my life given the amount of neglect, obscurity, and overlooking the album gets. So here I am, again. Doing the work of God, for everyone. Hosannas from the Basements Of Hell is so underrated and overlooked in fact, that it seems even the band has a biased unawareness of its magnitude and scope, since they rarely, if ever, play its songs live on stage during tours. To this day, I have seen Killing Joke perform many times over the years, never having heard a single tune from this beast of album played live, not even once. But maybe, this is nothing but an extra layer of mystique unto the ungraspable aura of this godly masterclass: the endless desire it evokes.

Truth be it, that I underestimated that “basement moment” with my friend sorely. Because well, I spend a lot of time alone with my records, and rarely have an outside element to help me remind myself what they mean to me. I don’t usually say out loud things like, “that is one of the things in my life which means the most to me” when listening to a record, and the event somewhat made me have a moment of reckoning. A moment in which I realized I should have put down publicly what this record means to me many years ago. Seventeen years ago to be precise, the day it came out and I first heard it and how it changed my life permanently and made me rethink, reinterpret, re-envision, and reconsider everything about rock music. But to get to where I want to get with this free flow of thoughts, I must go back in time, to tell you how I got here at this starting point to begin with.

I became a big fan of Killing Joke in the late 90’s when, reaching my late teens, I began to see heavy music’s best nuances when it presented itself in its more cryptic and less conventional forms (for the standards of a late 90’s eighteen year old at least), so from the Metallica, Iron Maiden, Pantera, Korn, Rage Against the Machine fan of my early teens, the Faith No More, Helmet, Slayer, Sepultura, Celtic Frost, and Minor Threat fan began to emerge around the age of fifteen. I began to appreciate the value in the non-immediacy of music, and how, when the listen required more attention, focus, work and dedication given to it, to dissect all its quirks and ambiguities, the end result in its appreciation and in sheer listening experience was far more satisfying compared to “immediate” music. This realization became the proverbial snowball, and while for literally years I had stagnated as a fan of the same seven-eight bands for most of my teens, suddenly, around the age of eighteen, the abyss to the underground opened beneath my feet, throttled by this desire to be challenged more and more in my listening. Within a couple years I was consuming endless amounts of what was considered then in the pre-digital era of a very un-diverse and quite culturally flat 90’s mediterranean country, obscure music–with bands like Mayhem, Big Black, Discharge, Napalm Death, Skinny Puppy and Godflesh being just a tip of a massive iceberg that still plumbs the depths of my interests below the surface and consumes me every day, to this day.

This is the necessary premise that needs to be done to introduce how, when I first encountered Killing Joke, they were bound to become a life-changing act for me. A band which summarized the entirety of things I love about heavy certain music: that which makes me curious, fascinated, destabilized and intrigued, but which also has that underlying level of infectious catchiness to render them always easy to enjoy, always appropriate. In a word: timeless. In fact today, if I need or want a more fun and relaxing listen, it’s Killing Joke listening time. And if I want a challenging, dark, cryptic and unpredictable listen, well, it’s also Killing Joke listening time.

Killing Joke was first nominated in my memory upon reading an interview circa 1999 with Helmet’s Page Hamilton, where he mentioned Big Black and Killing Joke as big influences of his. As the snowball I mentioned earlier predictably worked, I was in a phase of my life where literally one thing led to a hundred others with extreme ease, in an exponential musical discovery frenzy. Bands touring together, mentioning each other in interviews, doing side projects, changing members, collaborating etc., were just endless avenues into discovering the next thing via this “guilt by association” pattern, if you allow me to use it with a positive and ironic connotation. Naturally, upon hearing one of my then favorite musicians mention in turn his favorite musicians, I had no doubt in my mind that those artists he mentioned would soon become my favorites as well, so I immediately checked them out. Needless to say within a few days I was hooked on Songs About Fucking (I will spare you the rabbit hole of discovery Steve Albini sent me spiraling down into in a seperate essay), but Killing Joke seemed far more intimidating for me, for a few different reasons.

First of all, by then they already had some fifteen releases out already and the proverbial “from where to begin now?” question immediately made me hesitate. Second, I soon learned that by then not much of the original lineup was left, and also that they were essentially disbanded with Jaz Coleman possibly living in New Zealand (if I recall correctly). Martin Glover was mainly involved as a psytrance producer (also if I recall correctly), Paul Fergusson’s whereabouts unclear, Paul Raven by then a full-time member of Prong, and Geordie Walker busy in a new band called The Damage Manual. I just wasn’t ready to dedicate the time to recomposing that puzzle when I had so many other easier low hanging fruits to check out and an endless list of things to listen to. So I quickly decided to just check out their latest album, since, by late 90’s standards, it was still more typical to assume that the band’s latest and newest stuff had a better sound than the earlier stuff. The early 90’s had such a huge and sudden leap forward in studio audio fidelity standards; the beginning of what today we call the “loudness war,” brought forth by crushing mastering standards. But hey, back then the loudness and compression weren’t yet as unbearable as they are now, and hearing a full and enveloping recording with a huge low end was still a refreshing experience, I reckon.

And so it had been decided that Killing Joke’s chosen inaugural manifestation for me by sheer chance and circumstance, given my age, the times, my situation as a developing music fan was Killing Joke’s 1996 album Democracy, the last album they did before their ambiguous and never really officialised late 90’s “disbandment.” And Lord almighty, what an epiphany that was. The first time experiencing one of the strangest, darkest, heaviest and moving listening experiences of my life. An album teeming with mindless grooves, trance-like rhythms, hypnotic hooks–yet with a deep and unsettling darkness permeating it. To this day when I listen to the song “Aeon,” it’s just like looking in the mirror and seeing eighteen year old me, and that moment and time in life with incredible clarity: I still remember where I lived, what I was doing, who I was dating, who my circle of friends was, what I was wearing, what my hair looked like, and tons of other stuff in conjunction with discovering Killing Joke. That album, and those songs have now become synonymous in my soul with who I was in that time of my life.

And that’s when I became thankful that Killing Joke had so many albums to discover. It was like a feeling akin to an explorer setting foot for the first time on an unexplored continent full of valleys, deserts, coast lines, forests, jungles, and all different kinds of landscapes, views, and evocations to experience and explore. By the time Democracy had been released, a massive Killing Joke discography spanning 1978 to 1996 had already built, almost two decades of sonic exploration ranging from early 80s post punk and tours with Joy Division to late 80’s darkwave and gothic rock, to 90’s crushing industrial rock and metallic dirges and everything in between. To just think that Brighter Than A Thousand Suns and Pandemonium more than something from the same group of people sounded like Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hide is an understatement. But at the same time you could also recognize the same person in both characters. Therein lies the magic and endless mystique this band has given me for almost twenty-five years now: the rarity of a band who has an enormous discography with no bad recordings in it while having a huge breadth of diversity and styles, all equally worthy, accomplished, and of superb quality.

Having all these past albums of theirs to discover and dissect made their then breakup and uneventfulness less distracting and almost unnoticeable to me. For some two or three years, I just dug in and caught up, with albums like Pandemonium, Night Time, Extremities, Revelations, Brighter Than A Thousand Suns, and the 1980 self-titled becoming personal cornerstones to my life. And then, out of the blue, the many music magazines I used to read back then all began to disclose how Killing Joke had reconvened and been hard at work again on an album with Dave Grohl taking over the drums slot nonetheless. I think you can see the pattern here, where years of obscurity–but of exceptional and deliberately non-conforming craftsmanship–were paying back and revealing the sheer scope of the long lasting influence Killing Joke has had at many levels of the music industry, all the way to the top of it. One of the music industry’s most wealthy and popular musicians offered to play for free (as far as I recall, but I might be wrong) on the album of one of his favorite childhood bands who he’d heard were in need of a drummer. The aura of mystique and reverence surrounding Killing joke just receiving another seal of proof.

A quite peculiar and vaguely inappropriate curiosity is the move their record label took around the release of this album, to have a sticker on the CD which read “Killing Joke featuring Dave Grohl”… Why taint the importance of the release like that making it look like a Dave Grohl side project? Well, sales are sales I guess, and marketing drivers are marketing drivers. That marketing move never sat well with me to be honest. I won’t spend too many more words on Killing Joke’s 2003 second self-tilted comeback album recorded with Dave Grohl on drums, because if you’ve read this far you will already know this band doesn’t do forgettable albums or anything not worth loving, so let’s just move on to where we have to get to with the reassurance that it’s one of their best works ever and if you haven’t yet heard it, it’s an absolute must to discover and absorb. Songs like “Asteroid,” “Loose Cannon,” and “You’ll Never Get to Me” are now often pillars of the band’s pulverizing live sets and the album by now is considered by fans and critics alike as one of the band’s classics. The 2003 self-titled also opened the gates to a new era for Killing Joke: it was by far their heaviest, darkest, and most “metal” album until then, with crushing angular guitars, a massive bottom end, thundering drums, and Jaz Coleman’s dirty vocal “proclamation” experiments from Pandemonium brought back as a new standard to the band’s sound.

And that brings us to the subject of this writing.

In 2006, the now stably reformed Killing Joke issued a followup album titled Hosannas From The Basements Of Hell on the heels of the enthusiasm and raving reviews that their 2003 self-titled work had brought them, and perhaps also in the wake of the new heavier sound being honed and of a newfound popularity and interest surrounding the band also thanks to the presence of Dave Grohl on the previous recording. Killing Joke resumed working again with a new semi-permanent lineup of Coleman, Walker, and legendary industrial musician and long time Killing Joke bassist (though not their original one) Paul Raven (RIP) now permanently back into the fold. They opted for continuity with their previous work, an unusual move if you look at their discography in chronological order. Using a “slingshot effect” to work off the heavier sound of the 2003 predecessor, they took that menacing and darker sound further, at times exaggerating it even, venturing into an obscure realm that no Killing Joke fan had ever seen them enter before. To this day, I have to admit I am not still entirely sure why Hosannas came out as dark and heavy as it did. Let’s just call it one of those mysteries in life, particularly when analyzing how those songs never steadily made it into a live set thereafter, and how after the album’s release another hiatus occurred in the wake of Raven’s sudden death, which in turn pushed the band “back” into a (much celebrated and appropriate) original lineup reformation that would bring back subsequent recordings within the familiar realms of what we’d already known Killing Joke to sound like from the 80’s. There are various hypotheses on why Hosannas came out so dark, turned out becoming so underrated and even left behind in certain aspects by the band: Perhaps the fact it was their last recording with Raven? Maybe it was a work which they indissolubly now associate to a sad time in their life, or maybe the average, eight-minute length of all the tracks was an experiment difficult to transpose to a live setting. Or maybe all of those things and then some. We will never know. 

Despite it being 2006, the drum stool remained a rebus for Killing Joke, having had no permanent replacement for legendary founding drummer Paul Ferguson since his departure back in 1986. The vacant slot on Hosannas was filled by Ben Calvert (from defunct UK alternative metal act Vex Red) in his sole appearance for Killing Joke in the studio, but his performance behind the kit is noteworthy and unforgettable, having brought one of the heaviest and unrelenting drumming onslaughts on a Killing Joke record ever: the likely reason why Hosannas ended up sounding so telluric and monolithic. The album title is auto-referential, as the record was recorded in a basement studio of Faust Records below the street level in Prague in the Czech Republic, a dark place with no windows which, according to the band, brought forth a claustrophobic and ominous vibe to the recording sessions and to the overall sound of the record. The subterranean “underworld” vibe prominent on the record is also later evoked by the title-track’s music video, showing Coleman in his staple cult leader and doomsayer persona seemingly orchestrate some kind of primitivist ritual in a dystopian looking underground city or crypt readapted to a peasant cyberpunk living quarters of sorts.The album art is staggering to say the least: a grotesque, and deeply unsettling yet moving painting by surrealist Russian artist Victor Safonkin entitled “Inhuman Rearing,” depicting heavy loads of body horror, psychedelia, and retro-futurist militarism. The artwork featured in the inside booklet is taken from Safonkin’s “Society of Good Inventions” and “Hidden Aims” paintings and features extensive liner notes by Coleman. The lyrics of the album are also unusual for the band’s standards and also reaffirm this cryptic sense of Judas Priest-esque auto-referential self-celebration, as if the band was fully aware they were creating something huge, or perhaps thought their end as a band was near and as such decided to make it a swan song about themselves: a record which would look back on everything done, and on the curing effect it has on them as musicians and people. The opening track “This Tribal Antidote” for example references directly in its title what Killing Joke’s music is all about (the healing russeaunian concept of primitivism and tribalism the band is identified with), while the title track makes no attempt at hiding auto-referentialism when in its lyrics Coleman recites:

“I harbour thoughts of killing you
Pour petrol on you and then on me
But then I walk down the stairs
And Killing Joke waits for me there
Then we play – go psycho
With sticks and stones and bones beneath our homes we face ourselves
Hosannas rising from the basements of hell”

An unmistakable statement on the healing, mystical, and ritualistic nature of the band’s music which they not only offer to their fans, but themselves use to medicate, and how the whole “process” assumed significant meaning in writing the tracks of the album in the seclusion of the Czech studio. The closing track, “Gratitude,” on the other hand takes things even further, referencing the fans directly and thanking them for their support over the years. And the fact that both the opening track and the closing track are so autoreferential almost seems like a deliberate attempt by the band from an album concept standpoint to close the loop and leave no lose ends untied in this remembrance and celebration of the band’s story, it’s meaning (to themselves and to the fans), and its legacy.

And so the music you may ask? Wasn’t this article supposed to be all about that? Yes, but where to begin? It would be essentially like telling you the story of my life to describe the music of this record. It has been a seventeen year journey in the remotest outsides and innermost inwards of my soul to talk about this album, and mostly, I am now so biased and lacking lucidity in talking about it, that perhaps, I should avoid influencing people with words that come purely from a place of complete emotional abandon.

We are not talking about a Master Of Puppets, or a Reign In Blood, or a Paranoid, or a Pornography, or an Unknown Pleasures type of album here where the whole world agrees on its scope and influence, essentially rendering it even pointless to talk or rave about. Instead, we’re talking about a massively underrated album, whose songs are not even played live by the band which wrote and recorded them, and which many Killing Joke fans often overlook or don’t talk about as much as other Killing Joke albums. Simply put, we’re talking about an album of extremely enigmatic traits, whose aura, mystique, and inscrutable impenetrability are nearly endless or even divisive. But this article I decided to write is not a claim on how I think this album should be more considered than it is, or to change anyone’s mind on which the best Killing Joke album is. It is just a way for me to reflect once again on something incredibly meaningful to me, and to perhaps make people aware of the existence of something exceptional that dwells on a plane of incomprehensible, perpetual obscurity.

The songs on Hosannas roar from a place of utter darkness. Killing Joke have made no mystery of their apocalyptic concepts and fascination over the years. All we have to remember is the fact that the original lineup fell apart in the mid/late 80’s when Coleman himself “fled” to Iceland, convinced the end of the world was coming. But Hosannas takes that idea and concept to a destabilizing extreme. This album sounds like the world has gone mad, and chaos is just spreading out of control in an inevitable and definitive societal collapse, announcing this inexorable return to primitivism and darkness, and to some kind of new Middle Ages resting place of sorts. But to not be scared or worried, as that is mankind’s true nature and destiny completing its design: The savage being will eventually find peace in reconnecting with its true self in the end, via the stripping of all the toxicity and lies we’ve built ourselves via the constriction of a false society and flawed civilization we simply can not conceive or enact as just. So while the band had its “Tribal Antidote” all along via the healing effect of its oracle-like music, the rest of us will have to suffer this traumatic renouncement of society’s comfort, of all its lies, via definitive collapse back to a dark savage age.

The album as a whole thus comes with an unrelenting, pounding, and menacing “chain reaction” sound, with long (averaging five-six minutes in length and with frequent peaks of eight minutes), repetitive, and hypnotic songs with a huge cathartic load that feel like an event horizon has formed toward, one in which all events are quickly precipitating into with an ominous feeling of complete doom and inevitability. Some tracks offer moments of tense meditation, working as ominous “breathing holes” (as seen in the sublime tribal, symphonic trance of “Invocation,” or in the crushing industrial dirges of “Walking with Gods” that has almost a doom metal pace and vibe), but most of the album is locked into a mindless self-destruct mode with all tempos set on what appears to be a rapid countdown to the end. The title track, as well as “Implosion,” “Lightbringer,” and “Majestic” are like the soundtrack to a savage, mindless tribal dance headed straight into a mushroom cloud.

The album features Coleman’s darkest synth work to date and some of his most accomplished orchestration arrangements, but it is the duo of Walker/Raven on guitars and bass respectively who are the true epicenter of this apocalyptic roar of upheaval and liberation which is the album’s backbone; the duo locked into a binary and indissoluble telepathic link of sorts, alternating with incredible synchronicity between crushing, angular, and obsessive doom and damnation with liberating apertures and almost welcoming feelings of peace in knowing the end will be nothing but a beginning. My personal favorite cut on the album is perhaps “Judas Goat,” an ominous proclamation right from the title that reminds us in all its immensity where “industrial” rock and metal came from, and that builds tension and intensity by exploiting the listener’s fear with repetition and paranoia, deflagrating in the end with one of the rarest moments ever seen on a Killing Joke song to feature a “guitar solo,” or what you could define such a “thing:” a derailing, screeching masterclass of distorted tube insanity whose beauty is only comparable to its contemporaneous utter hideousness.

---

The 2022 Vinyl Reissue

Generally speaking, I am not too stuck on original pressings as often reissues address defects or room for improvement from the ordinal editions. This vinyl reissue of Hosannas goes with no exception: While not mentioned explicitly by the band or label, the reissue appears almost certainly to be a remaster, as the sound is louder and wider than the original 2003 pressing and the track list per vinyl side is different to accommodate the bonus tracks. Overall this reissue offers a more immersive and imposing listen while retaining the album’s original, tectonic sound. The three bonus tracks (“Afterburner” and its alternate version along with “Universe B”), aside from being already known from original CD singles of the original album release are unnecessary and distracting for such a long and well self-contained album, offer another “typical Killing Joke moment”, AKA the presence of B-sides or discarded tracks that are just as classic-sounding as the rest of the album’s tracks or even of the band’s catalog overall, and better than most bands’ hit singles. Particularly the bonus track “Universe B” is an intriguing revisitation with its raw and lo-fi demo production style, an interesting glimpse into the influence Killing Joke has had in the underground. The unintentional and experimental nature of the recording could make if fit right in with any early Godflesh recording (“Fall Of Because,” Godflesh’s first band name, was a Killing Joke song) and even some cryptic types of black metal or crust punk. The glossy finish from the original jacket is gone in favor of a much more appropriate mat finish which exalts Safonkin’s colorful but earthly paintings, and as is often the case, the heavier cardboard of the new sleeve gives a nicer and more resistant “feel” than the original. The liner notes and rest of the graphic layout remain virtually unchanged, aside from a few predictable and/or obligate edits to keep informations current with a release coming back again seventeen years after the original, but mostly the addition of a tribute line to the memory of Paul Raven, which personally I found profoundly moving and appropriate.

Speaking of the liner notes inside the gatefold, they offer a beautiful glimpse into the genesis, creation, and meaning of the record, which I’ve already discussed in part above, but which is a must to read for any Killing Joke fan, or of any fan of fully independent, fully autonomous artistry free of industry and label pressures and in total control of their craft as Killing Joke have always strived to be. Interesting of note is the part were Coleman claims the album’s original working tile was supposed to be War Zones, but that the setting and vibe within which the album was created soon steered the concept and title choice in an another direction:

“We walk down the winding stairs into a labyrinth of tunnels which upon closer inspection appears to be a vast network of old wine cellars. Eventually we arrive at the centre of the maze and confront the Minotaur: Geordie and Raven’s amps are humming, Benny’s kit and the keyboards are both assembled and waiting. We have arrived at the basements of Hell, the centre stage of this recording. The “where” and now the “why”! There is a certain tone (and atmosphere) to the best of our early recordings that in all honesty is missing from more recent recordings. The idea of multitracking umpteen guitars was anathema to Geordie, who favored a single live performance. Simple themes were repeated until we found ourselves in an ecstatic state. Everyone was free to come and go at will. Eventually recording and band practice merged into one. Everyone succumbed to the excesses and phantoms that define Prague, (periodically confronting the “Beast” in themselves.) Absinth fountains, Templar trails, carved skulls and serpent’s tails, the eye in the pyramid visible everywhere above spires of churches above altars, in resplendent gold on top of the stone cross in Mala Strana, watching; invoking a stream of beautiful paranoia. Death rings the bell of the astrological clock in Old Town Square reminding us of both mortality and approaching cataclysm. Grinning at the joyous spectacle of it all. Hosannas!”

All hail the eternal glory and legend of the Killing Joke.