Most KJ fans seem to dismiss this as one of their weakest recordings, yet as far as I'm concerned it is their best. You won't hear the poppy chorouses and predictable synth-backed bridges of their later albums here. It's powerful, disonant, disturbing and unrelenting, and it's unlike anything else recorded in the 80's. Recorded by Conny Planck (Neu, Devo, Kraftwerk) in Berlin, this album offers dark, textural, primal sounds with minimal arrangements that are much more raw and powerful than later KJ recordings.

"Revelations", Killing Joke's third major release and their last with original bassist Youth until "Pandemonium", was an obvious attempt by the band to vary their sound. The songs, due to the Conny Plank production, have a very uniformed sound, but they are nothing at all like the menacing goth-punk styles of the first two albums. "Revelations" is a more restrained album, although it was anything but tame for its time (especially considering that the band fled to Iceland before its release, to escape some sort of Armageddon they believed to be imminent). The guitars, as usual, are thick and dissonant, the drums are pounding (with hardly a hi-hat to be heard), and the lyrics seem to deal with the very issues that caused them to leave Britain: the breakdown of order and the end of the world. Masonic symbols adorn the sleeve, the songs have such sinister titles as "Chop Chop" and "The Pandys Are Coming", and the overall feel of the album itself is forboding and dark, if a little less aggressive than previous releases. "The Hum", "Empire Song", and "We Have Joy" are stand-out tracks, but the album doesn't contain a single dance hit or number one single (of course, Killing Joke is not the band to turn to if one expects such things). "Land of Milk and Honey" is an outright thrasher, "Dregs" contains some bizarre Coleman psycho-babble, and "Good Samaritan", while pleasant sounding, still hints lyrically at the band's strange infatuation with conspiracies and impending holocausts. As a whole, a great album, especially if you like the sound and story of this magnificent group, and a quite logical bridge between "What's This For?" and "Fire Dances".

if there's a sound that defines killing joke, it's geordie walker's devastating, colossal wall-of-guitar sound. and it's on this album that it first came into its own. listen to tracks like empire song and dregs and it's hard to define quite how something so ugly and dischordant can feel so beautifully infectious. also, on revelations, i think killing joke give their best demonstration of what it is that sets them so clearly apart from the me-too industrial/tribal post-punk mob. it's the simplicity of their material, and their restraint. this is some of the most tension-filled music of the eighties, yet much of that energy is generated not by cranking up the volume and overdubbing all the guitars, but through the ingenious and sparing use of dischord, distortion and, at times, silence.

Killing Joke's third album, 1982's "Revelations" is a pretty drastic departure-- working for the first time with an outside producer, Conny Plank, the is a cleaner sound-- more separation between the instruments rather than the somewhat muddy sound of the previous records-- this is further accentuated by a more metallic sound in the guitar.

The album maintains the sort of edgt apocalyptic vision of previous records, but Coleman's lyrics have moved into a somewhat ranting direction-- sometimes it succeeds ("We Have Joy"), but more often than not, it fails to sustain interest ("The Pandys Are Coming", "Chapter III" or the awful "Dregs"). And with the production uniform and consistent, and the album consisting largely of similar tempo and feel among the numbers, plus Coleman experimenting with his new singing style (he'd get it down right in a couple albums), the material really doesn't hold together well.

Its got its moments-- the album opens decent enough with "Empire Song" being one of the real highlights, and "Chop-Chop" barring annoying vocal is really amongst the most varied of early Killing Joke material, but beyond that, the album generally fails to sustain my interest. To top it off, like all the old Killing Joke albums, this one really needs a remastering, so the CD sound isn't really great either. Edit: There is now an imported remaster available with bonus tracks, and the sonic upgrade is well worth the extra few bucks investment.

It could be I'd think higher of this album outside of the context of the first two records, but it just doesn't hold up to them-- I'd recommend checking them out instead-- 1980's "Killing Joke" or 1981's "what's THIS for...!".