MP3: Treponem Pal, “Soft Mouth Vagina”
In my review of The Great Deceiver’s Life Is Wasted on the Living in the December issue (in stores TODAY!), I got sidetracked by the references to industrial music in the press materials and the mechanized edge to the music and blabbed for a while about industrial metal. I hadn’t even thought about any of these bands in forever, but for a couple of years in high school I had an impressive collection of low-rent Ministry ripoffs. If there was goofy cyberpunk posturing and/or samples of Cenobites and televangelists and shit, I was PSYCHED. Most of this stuff has not aged well at all, and most of it has been deservedly forgotten. I can barely even find YouTube examples for the bands I can remember. Like Skrew:
I owned two albums by that band.
Then there were the bands that got lumped in with industrial metal even though they didn’t incorporate any electronics. Some of these bands (Prong, Killing Joke, Big Black) were instrumental in my discovering stuff like Swans, Unsane, Joy Division, Wire, Chrome, and lots of other shit that is way cooler to namedrop than, like, Chemlab. Treponem Pal were nowhere near the top tier of these pseudo-industrial bands, but they did give the world “Soft Mouth Vagina.” I had to find this song again to confirm that it was as goofy and bizarre as it was in 1989. It absolutely is. “Eet’s a plaze, a plaze to leeve….”
Treponem Pal - Soft Mouth Vagina
In doing a couple of Wikipedia searches to “research” this entry, I discovered that I’m actually a source for the entry on “Industrial rock.” Holy shit, full circle.