thOught Industry – my favOurite band

Michigan’s greatest rock export – despite what you’ve heard – is not Ted Nugent, Alice Cooper, or even Iggy Pop. This band has a thousand times the talent – yet a tiny fraction of the fame – of Eminem or Kid Rock. They’re not from Detroit; and to be fair, they’ve probably played most major cities in the U.S. more times than they’ve made it around to the Motor City. And, while it may be true that Michigan-native bassist Jason Newsted (Flotsam and Jetsam, Metallica, Echobrain, Voivod) played some part in their signing to Metal Blade Records, their measure of fame has ultimately been quite puny. For those of you unfamiliar, let me introduce… Thought Industry.

Metal Blade Records made some degree of noise about Thought Industry’s 1992 debut via mailed photocopied flyers, name-dropping Newsted, and promising that you could “unexpect the expected” when listening to this Salvador Dali-inspired Kalamazoo, Michigan band. I had the good fortune of seeing them open for Godflesh at that time, and they were the most unusual prog-speed metal I had ever witnessed. Frontman Brent Oberlin, who had long hair in a ponytail (held with a scrunchie!), thick rimmed glasses, and a ‘Fuck Melvins’ t-shirt – played the most perplexing, frantic bass parts while convulsing in Mike Patton-meets-Yamatsuka Eye vocal dynamics. Other band members had pink and green hair (Dustin & Paul), beat a metal toolbox with dreadlocks a-flying (Chris), and sculpted frenzied, technical cyber-metal (all). Yet, when I purchased the Songs for Insects CD, it was not quite as outlandish or surreal. Apparently, a good number of the tunes on 1992’s Songs for Insects were longtime faves from their high school talent show origins, and a few of the more memorable songs from the show weren’t on the disc at all. What was striking about the album was the chilly, headphone-ready production courtesy of Skinny Puppy‘s David Ogilvie, and the very literate, evocative free verse of bassist/song-crafter/vocalist Oberlin. The text portion of this release really absorbed me at age 18 like no other album, with lyrics such as:

“Dabble dandy sulfur daisy eye. My eye. Debatable flummery. Me free. Lilliputian ego. A rayon vest. A smooth chest. No complications. No compendium. Sangfroid. I disencumber with equilibrium. A drunkard. I am”

The elaborate lyricsheet involved prefaces, introductory quotations, location descriptions, and a handful of words previously absent from my heavy metal listening, such as “lepidoptera“, “rigamarole“, or “leitmotif“. It wasn’t surprising, then, to find out in an interview that Brent preferred reading and literature to his “other” aptitudes as rock musician. And, through mailed correspondence, drummer Dustin Donaldson later explained that some of the songs I’d recalled so fondly from that show were actually “in the works” for their next release. Oh yes, it truly was to be unexpected…