Hard to think of a more pointless record than this one. Lick Your Ticket has already been called “the most forward-thinking album of the year”, because it mixes synths and sequencers with squalling, metallic electric guitar. This clash of civilisations clearly makes some people weak at the knees but back on Planet Earth we recognise it as the sort of industrial rock, not nearly as profound or menacing as it thinks it is, that Trent Reznor was knocking out when the world was young.
Nine Inch Nails were piss-poor, but Reznor wrote ‘Hurt’, so he’s forgiven, and at least he had a stab at being the sound of the future. But to entertain the notion that you are ‘forward-thinking’ with the implication that the bands around you are mired in the past, when your songs, sound and attitude are so patently a decade old, is odd and maybe delusional. This is not an argument for classicism, more an observation that it is just as conservative to lift from Suicide as Slade.
Lyrically, Chikinki over-reach themselves by some distance. I’m all for pretension but if you are going to title a song ‘To Sacrifice A Child’ or end your album with a ‘Time/Forever’‚ double whammy, then at least justify yourself with more than an affected whine and what you have been led to believe alienation sounds like. (Side two tells us it sounds a lot like Jane’s Addiction.)
What the existence of this record shows up, most of all, is the lack of imagination and inertia of titanic major labels. When you see Alan Moulder’s name in the credits, a man who made his name with Loveless, you see Lick Your Ticket as Universal’s attempt to buy passage on a ship that has long since sailed. Because there’s nothing here but surface, bad lyrics, and memories of better bands