Search - Killing Joke :: Chaos for Breakfast

Great material, but a high price tag

Michael Stack | North Chelmsford, MA USA | 04/05/2005

(3 out of 5 stars)

""Chaos for Breakfast" gathers early singles from Killing Joke's career together with a disc of unreleased demos. Each of the early singles ("Nervous System", "Wardance", "Requiem" and "Follow the Leaders") are presented on their own disc with the demos on a bonus disc, this is packaged together with a number of photos and brief liner notes. The music sounds brilliant and in your face, remastering is done to assure it sounds fresh and crisp, in your face like it was recorded yesterday (certainly better than the unremastered releases for the albums sound).



The music itself-- the "Nervous System" single is actually very unique sounding, even Killing Joke would largely abandon this sound-- its very open, with funky, dub rhythms and really non-dense guitar playing. The material itself is essential, in particular "Turn to Red" and "Are You Receiving" (the latter being a bit more punky than the rest of the material).



Two singles are included from their first album-- "Wardance" and "Requiem". "Wardance" is a different mix than appeared on the album, though I much prefer the album version-- this is more the classic KJ sound, the dub bass, tribal drums, and dense, punky guitars. Its B-side, "Pssyche", is one of the really great Killing Joke features, a live favorite certainly, with its dance beat and tossed off vocal, its full of the sort of energy and power that made the first Killing Joke album so amazing. The third disc, "Requiem", is largely extraneous-- its not that the material isn't great, the dark, churning, "Requiem" and the dance beats driving "Change" are among the best Killing Joke material, its just that these two tracks are available in this form on the band's first album, albiet not sounding as good as this. The demo of "Requiem" on the end of this is really not substantially different from the released version until the ending, where it suffers from some bizarre production choices thankfully not used on the album.



From the second Killing Joke album comes "Follow the Leaders"-- a dub/punk song presented here in its original version and with a dub mix and the original lyrics intact. While the album version (and the b-side "Tension") are both available on "what's THIS for...!" (although again, they're both great songs-- in particular the rhythm section is on fire on "Follow the Leaders"), the two mixes are nice to have. THe dub mix is more or less an instrumental take on the song, smartly shortened in length to prevent its repetitive nature from getting annoying. The original lyrics are largely unnoticable-- the piece itself is nearly identical, but its nice to have from a collector's standpoint.



The fifth disc is probably the most interesting for collectors, its nearly an hour's worth of demos from the first two albums. While this sounds interesting, much of it is just the album versions minus a few overdubs, and the 19 minute dub piece gets really irritating after a while.



In the final analysis, this set is a bit expensive for what it is-- just under two hours of music-- the presentation is beautiful, but its really for collectors only."