| Track of the Week - 11/26/07 |
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W.A.S.P. - Kill Your Pretty Face
Listen to Kill Your Pretty Face on Rhapsody
For this week's horror track, I wanted to switch gears a bit and go with a different genre of music for once and get away a bit from the ballads. This song definitely fits that bill quite well.
Kill Your Pretty Face was part of W.A.S.P.'s 1997 album, which is collectively known as K.F.D., because the record label was apparently uncomfortable with the actual title - Kill Fuck Die. Those record label execs are an odd bunch, aren't they? At any rate, the album was sort of a return to W.A.S.P.'s roots and was something of a meld between the standard heavy metal fare that the band was known for and a dark industrial edge that was all the rage at the time (Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson) - Think Alice Cooper's Brutal Planet, just a whole lot darker.
K.F.D. featured the return of fan-fave, guitarist Chris Holmes who had left the band in 1990 shortly after the band's most successful album, Headless Children, and his... umm... memorable appearance in the rock-doc, The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. According to lead singer Blackie Lawless, both Holmes and he were coming off bad relationships at the time and the bitterness was reflected in the very dark and bleak K.F.D.. In fact, both Lawless and Holmes penned this particular track, Kill Your Pretty Face.
Come on give me a little piece of death
The darkened heart inside the self
To lives to sleep, to dies to awake
Kill your pretty, kill your pretty face
I'm not sure a whole lot of analysis has got to go into a song with the title Kill Your Pretty Face. The song, and the whole album, is deep-rooted in the pain and agony associated with bad relationships. Top that with Lawless's statement that the album was also inspired by the film Apocalypse Now, which itself was based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness ("The horror! The horror!"), and you get the idea. There is one interesting tidbit to add about Kill Your Pretty Face. The band has long been known for their shocking tactics on-stage. Well, for this particular track, they upped the ante as it were. I won't go into great detail and let you search it out if you like, but let's just say it involved a nun strapped to a cross and a knife attached to Lawless's infamous codpiece and a bloody fetus.
K.F.D. may be one of the darkest albums W.A.S.P. ever produced and that is saying a lot - especially since the preceding album was titled Still Not Black Enough. It also one of their most underrated albums as well. The band would switch gears again on their next two albums, Helldorado and Unholy Terror, which were more of a return to the more familiar W.A.S.P. sound (ala 9.5.-N.A.S.T.Y. days), but returned with a darker edge with the 9/11-influenced Dying for the World in 2002. The band has even stated that the emotions that went into K.F.D. gave them pause to revisit the music afterwards, but fortunately has recently started playing Kill Your Pretty Face while on the road again. It is dark, twisted, and ultra-aggressive, but the song and album are well worth checking out.
This entry was edited on December 9, 2007, 9:20 pm.
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November 26, 2007, 8:50 pm |
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