Remix Dys Temper

Remix Dys Temper

Vancouver, Canada's Skinny Puppy get the makeover by an eclectic group of acts who pay homage to the defunct trio's decade of horrific industrial dance. The opening track, a fairly uninspiring take on "Rodent" by former Puppy engineer Ken Marshall, belies the gems of innovation woven amid the techno airbrushing that is the disc's main theme. Autechre warps "The Killing Game" into an unrecognizable freeform, San Francisco's Riz Maslen (a.k.a. Neotropic) reconstructs the spooky "Love in Vein" with appropriate bite, and Rhys Fulber (late of Front Line Assembly) transforms "Worlock" into a nightmarish epic. Even more left-field are the contributions from the Deftones (pumping up the aggression but little else) and Guru (contrasting Ogre's anguished howls with bright, funky grooves). Although <i>ReMix Dys Temper</i> serves as reminder that Skinny Puppy are responsible for 1990s synth-rock acts such as God Lives Underwater (whose "Testure" mix is predictable), it also reveals that beneath the layers of signature audio terror were songs that stand up well after the fact and that influenced a generation of electronic experimenters. <i>--Liisa Ladouceur</i>