The Infidel

Years before Trent Rezner-inspired horror music began to appear within the soundtracks of big-budget serial killer flicks, Skinny Puppy founder cEvin Key laid the frightening electronic groundwork that would influence Nine Inch Nails and a whole generation of industrial artists. Key, along with fellow Skinny Puppy member D.R. Goettel, formed the side project Doubting Thomas around 1990 in order to delve more specifically into instrumental "soundtracks for movies that never existed." With their first full-length release, The Infidel, Key and Goettel generously shuffle bleak film and television audio clips into their oppressive synth padding and industrial drum machinery to form their own audio storylines. The well placed dialog samples provide just the right amount of nihilistic poetry to keep listeners attuned to the vague, but disturbing message of human waste and blindness that defines "The Infidel" and perhaps all of the industrial genre's better work. When a concerned character from George Lucus' 1970 sci-fi coming-out THX 1138 asks "What's wrong?" at the end of "F862's" psychotic bounce, the response plays like a final post-rock verdict of a spurned media culture addict's credo, "Nevermind."