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**Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel - "Nail" ★★★★☆**

J.G. Thirlwell has never been one to shy away from confrontation, and his grotesquely monikered Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel represents perhaps the most viscerally challenging incarnation of his sprawling Foetus constellation. Released in 1985, "Nail" stands as a testament to what happens when industrial music gets dragged kicking and screaming through a blender filled with big band arrangements, cartoon violence, and enough testosterone to fuel a small army.

Before "Nail" hammered its way into existence, Thirlwell had already established himself as a provocateur of the highest order through his earlier Foetus Über Frisco and You've Got Foetus on Your Breath projects. The Australian-born, New York-based composer had spent the early '80s crafting a sound that took the mechanical brutality of industrial pioneers like Throbbing Gristle and fed it through a prism of orchestral bombast and vaudevillian theatricality. Where his contemporaries were content to wallow in electronic nihilism, Thirlwell was busy constructing elaborate sonic cathedrals dedicated to excess itself.

"Nail" finds Thirlwell at his most unhinged, wielding drum machines like medieval weapons while layering on horn sections that sound like they've been ripped from a fever dream version of a 1940s big band. This isn't music for the faint of heart – it's the sound of someone taking every aggressive impulse known to humanity and orchestrating them with the precision of a master conductor having a complete nervous breakdown.

The album's crown jewel, "Descent Into the Inferno," lives up to its biblical namesake with seven minutes of relentless sonic assault that somehow manages to be both completely chaotic and meticulously arranged. Thirlwell's vocals alternate between operatic bellowing and primal screaming, while the instrumentation builds layer upon layer until it threatens to collapse under its own weight. It's the kind of track that makes you question your life choices while simultaneously making you want to run through a brick wall.

"The Overture from 'Pigdom Come'" serves as the album's mission statement, a sprawling epic that crams more ideas into its runtime than most bands manage across entire careers. Here, Thirlwell demonstrates his uncanny ability to make violence sound celebratory, crafting what amounts to a march toward Armageddon that you can't help but dance to. The track's shifting dynamics and unexpected orchestral flourishes reveal the classically trained composer lurking beneath the industrial provocateur.

"Power Is Power" strips things back to their brutal essentials, built around a drum machine pattern that hits like a jackhammer to the skull. Yet even at its most minimalist, the track showcases Thirlwell's gift for arrangement, with each element placed with surgical precision to maximize impact. It's industrial music for people who find Einstürzende Neubauten too subtle.

When viewed alongside Thirlwell's other masterworks, "Nail" occupies a unique position in the Foetus mythology. Where 1984's "Ache" had introduced the world to his particular brand of orchestrated chaos, "Nail" refined the formula into something approaching perfection. The album's influence can be heard in everything from the cinematic scope of later Foetus releases like "Flow" to the theatrical brutality that would define much of the '90s industrial scene.

The production, handled by Thirlwell himself with assistance from various collaborators, manages to be both lo-fi and grandiose – no mean feat when you're trying to capture the sound of civilization collapsing in real time. Every snare hit sounds like a gunshot, every horn blast like the last trumpet of the apocalypse, yet the overall effect is strangely exhilarating rather than depressing.

Three decades later, "Nail" remains a singular achievement in the annals of industrial music. While Thirlwell would continue to evolve and experiment through various Foetus incarnations, few releases have matched this album's perfect balance of sophistication and savagery. It's an album that rewards both casual listeners looking for something to soundtrack their rage and serious music nerds who appreciate its complex arrangements and genre-defying ambition.

In an era where industrial music has largely been domesticated and absorbed into mainstream metal, "Nail" stands as a reminder of what the genre was capable of in the