Sutcliffe Jugend

Sutcliffe Jugend

Blue Rabbit

Crucial Blast

Appearing in the early ’80s as an offshoot of the legendary UK band Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jugend was soon recognized as an equally confrontational and extreme purveyor of the early power electronics / industrial sound, producing on their early Come Organisation releases We Spit on Their Graves and Campaign some of the most abrasive and violent music ever. Since then, the group has pursued a unique sonic vision that combines transgressive subject matter—dark, cerebral musings on violence and sexual perversion—with brutal feedback and synthesizer damage. Recently, however, Sutcliffe Jugend has explored darker, more restrained (at least on a sonic level) sounds alongside their harsher work, and Blue Rabbit is the latest such offering, unfolding like a night-terror across the album’s eight tracks.  For fans who are primarily familiar with the group’s harsher output on Come Org and Cold Spring, Blue Rabbit is a revelation; a seething, quasi-ambient nightmare that lingers with the listener, its creep factor enhanced by the unsettling paintings from band member Kevin Tomkins that make up the album art. One won’t find their trademark power electronics here, nor the dark throbbing industrial of 2011’s With Extreme Prejudice; this is a darker, more unsettling experience, saturated with an atmosphere of doom and smoldering violence, as if Sutcliffe Jugend were channeling the creaking dread of Nurse With Wound’s Salt Marie Celeste through a series of blood-freezing psychosexual nightmares.