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Posted 20 hours ago

Night Time

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Heavy on the synths, _Night Time_ still manages to retain the dark, sometimes unnerving lyrics and sound that the previous Killing Joke albums delivered. All told, i prefer the goth-slanted Killing Joke, and this has as good a slant as any of their albums.

The album tracks have all been remastered in 2007, and although the music definitely sounds like it was made in the 80's, as it was, it sounds great. But fast-forward 22 years, and this album sits proudly in my collection beside other excellent outcomes such as Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, Pandemonium, and Wilful Days, with all songs barring the afore-mentioned (i love that term) "Eighties" ranking amongst my favorite tracks from the band. At gunpoint I'd pick 'Night Time,' 'Love Like Blood' or the most infamous song to be ripped off by Nirvana 'Eighties,' although 'Kings and Queens' and 'Europe' are extremely close. I did play a few songs from this album to my friend yesternight and she thought it was them, and I’m sure I would’ve needed a few minutes to realise myself if I hadn’t known what I was listening to in advance.Ned Raggett of AllMusic remarked that "" Eighties" turned out to be the retrospectively most well-known song, due to a surprising and not always remembered example of Killing Joke's influence -- Nirvana, of all groups, thoroughly cloned the watery guitar line at the heart of the track for " Come as You Are"". It’s closer to The Cure than anything else, as though it were THE album they were meant to make but didn’t because they spent the mid ‘80s being quite, well, mid. They had done some solid work previously, but they were simply striving for different sounds than i drift toward. Killing Joke argueably hit their commercial peak with Night Time, an album that contains a lot of the dissonant sounds of their earlier works but also a much more accessible style of songwriting. Many songs here still find their way into the band’s very heavy recent live performances without feeling out of place in the least.

The tension between the two sides of Killing Joke struck a perfect balance on Night Time, and as a result, it is arguably the quartet's freshest album to date, with a warm, anthemic quality now supplementing the blasting, driving approach that made the band's name. The first track i heard from this album was actually "Eighties", a song that did nothing for me then and nothing for me now. However, the same Killing Joke riff could also have been inspired by The Damned's 1982 song "Life Goes On", whaddyaknow!

Songs like “Eighties” and “Love Like Blood” put these guys into the mainstream, if only for a short while. Notice just how big the songs sound; although you could trace them back to work like “Pssyche”, this LP is where I feel like KJ’s future tendencies start to properly come to the fore, emphasising the grandiose edge of their sound in mesmerising fashion above anything else - except here it takes that approach within an extremely likeable poppy atmosphere instead of the harshness of metal, and they would go on to become perhaps the best band in all of that genre thanks to what they had already perfected here. Mind you, you have to like the distinctive vocals, guitar and rhythms of this niche indy band though.

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