Various: BlackBox WaxTrax! Records: The First 13 Years - Disc 1 of 3 CD Track Listing

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Various BlackBox WaxTrax! Records: The First 13 Years - Disc 1 of 3 (1994)
Originally Released November 8, 1994\n\nAMG EXPERT REVIEW: Wax Trax! was the definitive industrial label and the four-disc box set Black Box is the definitive overview of their peak years. The label's artists -- including Ministry, Trent Reznor, and KMFDM -- developed the corrosive guitars, synths, distorted vocals, and jackhammer beats that became the signature sound of industrial. Blackbox gathers nearly every worthwhile song to emerge from the Chicago label, including many rare singles, and provides an excellent summary of some of the most cutting-edge dance music of the 1980s and '90s. -- Stephen Thomas Erlewine\n\nAmazon.com Customer Review\nI wish I could give this collection 18 stars, November 3, 2002 \nReviewer: A music fan from boston, ma united states \nI dj'd at college radio stations for 5 years in the late '80s, and was always pleasantly excited when I found a Wax Trax! label in the New bin. (Unfortunately, I usually did my shows in the dark and thought the name was "Wax Traxi" for the longest time!) The label was a mainstay of industrial music, and founders Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher consistently managed to sign and produce the most exciting musicians of the time -- the many incarnations of dear troubled genius Al Jourgensen, The Young Gods, FLA, Coil, Controlled Bleeding, Doubting Thomas, A Split Second, Lead Into Gold, Psychic TV, Foetus -- they are all here on three great discs packed with music that makes you want to move and feel. Disc One, Track One: Trent Reznor covers Black Sabbath's 'Supernaut' with 1000 Homo DJs -- a version previously unreleased, and then you are zipping through Sister Machine Gun and The Young Gods and oh so many more seminal industrial bands. Divine puts the "fun" in funky with "The Name Game", the label's second release. I was also happy to hear a few groups that had somehow slipped past me the first time around, like Wreck. I had a great time listening to this collection and am still listening to it. You can put in any of the three discs and be happy for a long time.\n\nThe packaging is beautiful -- a heavyweight black box covered with hip lettering and disturbing images; three black CD cases containing labeled discs and a listing with artist, cut, time and version information; and a terrific booklet that relates the anecdotal history of Wax Trax! -- it's artistically interesting as well as substantive and entertaining.\n\nIf you enjoy industrial music, you cannot go wrong with this incredible collection of the music and people that started it all. And why not put a few bucks into the pockets of the guys who loved the music more than the profits? \n\nAmazon.com Customer Review\nThe start of indust. music in the chicago underground and US, February 19, 1999 \nReviewer: c30click@aol.com from Virginia, U.S.A. \nIf I could rate this compilation any higher I would instantly. There is nothing quite like popping in disc 1 and hearing Trent Reznor screaming his lungs out to a Black Sabbath song and knowing that there are 30 more songs after that one. Everything from the classically punk, Strike Under, to the ultimately twisted likes of Pig and Pankow. Not to mention that this compilation holds in it the very reason industrial music has made it as far as it has in the past years. If it wasn't for WaxTrax! and the Chi-town underground.. the only people trying to figure out what KMFDM (Kein Mehrheit Fur Die Mitleid) stands for would be a bunch of germans. Long live Alien Jourgensen, TKK, Sister Machine Gun (the list goes on), and finally...JIM AND DANNIE... may they be immortalised as music industry gods. \n\nAmazon.com Customer Review\nExcellent sampling of the first 13 years of Wax Trax Records, November 30, 1998 \nReviewer: A music fan from Colorado Springs, CO \nI shucked out 70 bucks for the limited steel box edition of this set, only to have it stolen, and I promptly went right out and bought it again. If you like hearing the origins of industrial, techno, and oddly enough, the KLF, this would be a welcome addition to your collection. It has quite a few tracks that you won't find anywhere except a used record shop, and even then, you may not find what you want. With tracks ranging from Coil, to Ministry (in their pop-music phase), to the ever popular Divine, KMFDM, and various mutations of bands mixed with other bands, there is even a handy booklet with the history, pictures, and members of each incarnation of this great label. From their beginnings as a little store-front in Denver, to a full-fledged company in Chicago, this is an interesting piece of musical history. \n\nHalf.com Notes\nThe limited edition of BLACK BOX is a three-CD numbered box set containing Wax Trax releases from 1980 to 1992, as well as many out-of-print, hard to find, and previously unreleased tracks. It is housed in steel and covered in black net mesh, and contains a poster, a 76-page illustrated book, two coasters, an embroidered patch, and a nest of loose cassette tape (culled from studio outtakes). This edition is limited to 10,000. \n\nChicago industrial music haven WaxTrax began like most indie labels; hadrcore music fans Dannie Flesher and Jim Nash decided to put their energies into their musical obsession, and ultimately, history was made. The label made their first real splash by releasing Ministry's Cold Life single. Young Ministry leader Alan Jourgenson developed an interdependent relationship with the label, continuing to produce WaxTrax projects even after Ministry left for the majors. Jourgenson's aesthetic helped to shape the label's sound, which focused on (and virtually spawned) the burgeoning field of industrial music. With acts like KLF and Acid Horse (also represented here), WaxTrax branched out into the related genres of dance and electronic music, but it was the uncompromising urban-apocalypse sound of the Revolting Cocks, Ministry and others that became the WaxTrax trademark. This three-disc box features all the above-mentioned artists along with dozens of others. \n\nThe most striking thing about BLACK BOX is the stylistic diversity. The razor-throated million-beats-per-minute extravaganzas are interspersed with radically divergent efforts. Clock DVA, Coil and Controlled Bleeding contribute cuts underlining the fact that there's more to WaxTrax than Ministry soundalikes.\n\nRolling Stone (01/26/1995)\n3 Stars - Good - ...Brutally aggressive electronic dance music....a three-CD collection spanning the label's first 13 years, presents the core of the legacy....skirt[s] the line between the disturbing and the impenetrable, the hilarious and the self-indulgent...\n\nSpin (1/95, p.72) - Highly Recommended - ...triumphantly dishonest rock--gibbering past plastic spasms, like a factory suddenly starting to wiggle at the hip...\n\nAlternative Press (1/95, p.56) - ...a three-disc collection documenting the thirteen-year history of Chicago's Wax Trax label, the organization responsible for adding the prefix 'electro-' to the word 'rock' and still having the result make sense...\n\nRolling Stone Review (3 Stars)\nThrobbing Gristle once facetiously labeled it "entertainment through pain," this brand of audio terrorism that began to emerge in the late 70s. It was anti-music made by non-musicians who used machines instead of guitars and drums to mimic and mock their personal chaos. Many of them found a home at Wax Trax, a little storefront record shop turned label in Chicago run by Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher.\n\nSince 1980, Wax Trax has bombarded the world with more than 200 records, many of them suitable for inducing migraines, routing the neighbors or deep-sixing a party. Brutally aggressive electronic dance music wasn't born at Wax Trax, but the label soon became synonymous with it. Black Box, a three-CD collection spanning the label's first 13 years, presents the core of the legacy -- Al Jourgensen's Ministry and countless alter-ego bands, plus KMFDM, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, the KLF and Laibach -- and an assortment of less-crucial amusements. (Because of licensing problems, the key contribution of Belgium's Front 242 had to be omitted from the box entirely.)\n\nIt makes for bumpy listening, skirting the line between the disturbing and the impenetrable, the hilarious and the self-indulgent. Now that Nine Inch Nails and Ministry are part of the new mainstream, the Wax Trax onslaught no longer sounds as daunting, terrifying or just plain evil as it once did. What survives is the warped humor behind it all. Black Box is welded together by pranksters and misfits, leather boys and computer hackers, a 300-pound female impersonator and bands with names like Mussolini headkick and Controlled Bleeding.\n\nDisc 1 kicks off with three shots of Jourgensen: a preposterously distorted version of Black Sabbath's "Supernaut" by 1000 Homo DJ's (featuring Trent Reznor); the Revolting Cocks' "No Devotion"; and the Cocks' "Beers, Steers and Queers," the mother of all frat-rock anthems. From there it's not such a huge leap to Pankow's "Me and My Ding Dong" ("I'm talkin' about my best friend") and Divine's "The Name Game," which wrap up Disc 3.\n\nIt's a kitsch tour that drops by the Thrill Kill Kult disco inferno for "Do You Fear (for Your Child)?" with its Chic-on-acid chorus of "Yowsah, yowsah, yowsah!" Doubting Thomas warns that "before this day is out, you'll be begging me to kill you" on "Father Don't Cry." Another Jourgensen lark, PTP's "Rubber Glove Seduction," puts together a knife, a wife and a kitchen clock in what could be a Hitchcock spoof. On "Geburt Einer Nation," a remake of Queen's "One Vision," the once-ominous Laibach sound like a parody of fascism with their goose-stepping rhythms and baritone vocals. Funniest is "Halloween," from the days when Ministry were still trying to be Depeche Mode.\n\nWax Trax (which declared bankruptcy in 1992 and was subsequently purchased by TVT Records) reveled in outlandishness, but it put out a number of mediocre records, and some of them survive on Black Box. Dallying in conventional guitar punk was not a good idea, as demonstrated by Strike Under's "Elephant's Graveyard" and Wreck's remake of "Atomic Dog." Throughout the collection the dance beats are not particularly danceable, and the vocalists -- with rare exceptions -- are interchangeably annoying.\n\nBut if Black Box were a seamless "hits" collection, it wouldn't be Wax Trax. Bad drugs, B movies, the relentless abuse of technology -- the label was held together not so much by a sound as by a feel and an attitude. There were no political sloganeers at Wax Trax, but it is more than coincidental that the label flourished amid the conservative chill of the '80s, offering a series of rude gestures aimed at disrupting business as usual. Harder, shriller sounds have eclipsed much of the music in this box, but not the audacity of the original vision. (RS 700) -- GREG KOT
This misc cd contains 15 tracks and runs 73min 24sec.
Freedb: cf11320f
Buy: from Amazon.com

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