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**VIVISectVI - Skinny Puppy**
★★★★☆

In the pantheon of industrial music's most uncompromising statements, few albums have managed to marry genuine artistic vision with such visceral political fury as Skinny Puppy's 1988 masterwork VIVISectVI. Arriving at the peak of the Canadian trio's creative powers, this sonic assault represents both the band's most focused conceptual statement and their most punishing listening experience – a 47-minute descent into the mechanised hell of animal experimentation that remains as relevant today as it was three decades ago.

The genesis of VIVISectVI emerged from the band's growing horror at the pharmaceutical industry's treatment of laboratory animals, particularly after keyboardist cEvin Key witnessed footage of vivisection experiments. What began as righteous anger evolved into something far more sophisticated: a complete artistic statement that used the medium of industrial noise to mirror the dehumanising brutality of its subject matter. This wasn't protest music in any conventional sense – it was psychological warfare, designed to make listeners complicit in the very horrors it condemned.

Musically, VIVISectVI finds Skinny Puppy at their most unrelenting. The album strips away much of the dancefloor-friendly elements that had crept into their earlier work, replacing them with grinding, metallic textures and Nivek Ogre's most tortured vocal performances. Producer Dave Ogilvie, working with the band for the third time, crafts a sound that's simultaneously claustrophobic and expansive – every snare hit feels like a hammer blow, every synthesised shriek like the cry of something dying.

The album's centrepiece, "Testure," remains one of industrial music's most harrowing achievements. Built around a relentless, pummelling rhythm and samples of actual laboratory sounds, it's a track that weaponises repetition, grinding the listener down through sheer sonic brutality. Ogre's vocals, processed beyond human recognition, become another instrument of torture, while the track's video – featuring actual vivisection footage – proved too extreme for most broadcasters.

Equally devastating is "Human Disease (S.K.U.M.M.)," which opens with the sound of barking dogs before descending into a nightmare of distorted vocals and industrial percussion. The track's title serves as both diagnosis and warning – in Skinny Puppy's worldview, humanity itself has become the pathogen. "Dogshit" continues this theme with perhaps the album's most aggressive moments, its title track serving as a scatological metaphor for society's treatment of the vulnerable.

Yet for all its confrontational posturing, VIVISectVI never feels like mere shock tactics. Tracks like "Harsh Stone White" and "VX Gas Attack" demonstrate the band's sophisticated understanding of dynamics and texture. The former builds from whispered menace to full-blown chaos, while the latter uses space and silence as effectively as noise and fury. These aren't just songs – they're psychological profiles of a society in moral freefall.

The album's most accessible moment comes with "Censor," which manages to smuggle genuine melody into its industrial framework without compromising the overall vision. It's a reminder that beneath all the confrontation lies genuine songcraft – these aren't random noise experiments but carefully constructed compositions designed for maximum impact.

VIVISectVI's influence on subsequent generations of extreme music cannot be overstated. Its DNA can be heard in everything from Nine Inch Nails' more aggressive moments to the harsh electronics of modern power electronics artists. More importantly, its fusion of political content with uncompromising sonics helped establish the template for industrial music as genuine artistic statement rather than mere provocation.

Three decades on, the album's central concerns feel more urgent than ever. In an era of factory farming and continued animal exploitation, VIVISectVI's warnings about the dehumanising effects of systematic cruelty seem prophetic rather than hysterical. The band's decision to donate proceeds from the album to animal rights organisations wasn't mere gesture politics – it was recognition that art, however extreme, must be backed by action.

VIVISectVI remains Skinny Puppy's most uncompromising statement – an album that refuses to offer comfort or easy answers. It's not an easy listen, nor was it meant to be. Instead, it stands as testament to industrial music's capacity for genuine moral seriousness, proof that the genre's most extreme practitioners were often its most thoughtful. In a world that increasingly resemb