I admit, I'm biased when it comes to My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult; I bought their first EP back in 1987/1988/whenever the hell that was, was amused by their mock-Satanic, dialog-sample-heavy industrial groove, and followed their career with (perhaps unwarranted) enthusiasm for several years thereafter. I bought their records; I endured a bunch of crappy live shows where the token live drummer couldn't keep pace with the DAT; I even lost a girlfriend by wearing a TKK t-shirt to one of her family functions. And eventually, as is typically the case with shallower youthful interests, I drifted away from them.

Now that I've been deprogrammed for more than a decade, I can see Thrill Kill Kult for what they were -- an amusingly kitschy side-trip into theatrical darkness and excess. Like White Zombie and Lords of Acid, they're 95 percent shock and five percent substance -- and that's being generous. Their purpose is to shock and titillate, and once you've gotten over your need to be shocked and titillated on a regular basis, they simply seem silly, albeit lovably so.

For my money, TKK went south when they abandoned the whole Satan-worship thing in favor of the Russ Meyer/Bettie Page/glam/biker/porno/disco/lounge/kitsch vibe they adopted round-about Sexplosion. Compare the cheesy "A Martini Built for 2", or the downright limp "Girl Without a Planet", to the towering might of the ludicrously danceable (and just plain ludicrous) "Kooler Than Jesus" -- there's no contest. It's hard to believe that the group that made the tepid, whiny "Blondes With Lobotomy Eyes" also recorded disturbing but dancefloor-friendly epics of industrial drugs 'n' deviltry such as "A Daisy Chain 4 Satan" or "And This Is What the Devil Does". By the mid-nineties, the group had clearly embraced their little corner of quasi-mainstream major label success, shocking suburban moms for fun and profit, then pandering to twentysomething swingers when Marilyn Manson stole their turf. And let's not even discuss "Hour of Zero", from 2001's The Reincarnation of Luna, the Kult's version of a midtempo rap track. In fact, if we all concentrate really hard, we might be able to will it clean out of existence. Ready? One... two... three!

That's better. Good work.

Like I said, I'm biased. If you'd prefer to come to your own conclusions regarding Thrill Kill Kult, The Beast of TKK is a handy, albeit poorly organized resource: the band's "hits" are strewn haphazardly across the disc like pills on a strung-out stripper's dressing room table. Once you've got 'em in order, you can revel in the irony as these faux-Satanists gradually go to hell in a handbasket.