Music / Angelspit

On the left, DestroyX. On the right, ZooG.

Krank! It! Up!

One of Australia's most well-known industrial bands, Angelspit is a unique industrial act that have been destroying sound and music alike for years. The group began in the early 2000's, when Karl Learmont and Amelia Tan met on an online zine forum. Together, they worked on Amelia's zine distro, Vox Populis, eventually turning it into the largest zine distro in the Southern Hemisphere. From there, they started making their own zines, and finally started making music. The band's name comes from the Sonic Youth song 'Orange Rolls, Angel's Spit'- both are fans of the band. Having created the stage names 'ZooG' and 'DestroyX' for themselves, Angelspit began to draw attention through their unconventional style of music, their 'we don't give a fuck what you think' attitude, and their awesome mode of dress. They released their first EP, Nurse Grenade in 2004, and continued on, releasing their first album, Krankhaus, in 2006. Having closed the distro to focus on their music, they then released a music video for their song 'Vena Cava' that pretty much defined their schtick.

Their music is glitchy, distorted and nothing like conventional music whatsoever, and it's a huge part of why they are so unique. Their lyrics, however, range from endorsing cannibalism, murder, torture and all that wonderful stuff to railing against stereotypes, traditions, modern society and the like. Their music videos, in contrast, generally have nothing to do with the songs but will give you nightmares (and always have amazing outfits in them). In another contrast, the band themselves are incredibly lovely people both online and IRL. In 2011, they added three new members: Valerie Gentile (formerly of The Cruxshadows and Black Tape For a Blue Girl) on guitar, Matt James (replacing Chris Kling, the original drummer) on drums, and The Liar as their video manipulator. DestroyX left the band in 2014, leaving ZooG as the primary vocalist. She has since released two EPs, Carbon Black and Queen of Risk, under the name Amelia Arsenic.

Discography:

• Nurse Grenade (2004, EP)
• Krankhaus (2006)
• Krankhaus: Surgically Atoned (2007, remix album of Krankhaus)
• Blood Death Ivory (2008)
• Black Kingdom Red Kingdom (2009, remix album of Blood Death Ivory)
• Hideous And Perfect (2009)
• Larva, Pupa, Tank, Coffin (2010, remix album of Hideous and Perfect)
• Carbon Beauty (2011, second remix album of Hideous and Perfect)
• Hello My Name Is (2011)
• The Product (2014)
• Cult Of Fake (2016)
• Black Dog Bite (2017)

Angelspit provide examples of the following tropes:

• Album Title Drop: Blood, Death, Ivory is mentioned in "Homo-Machinery" ("Blood, death, don't forget the ivory") and Hideous and Perfect is a line from the track "Sleep Now ("What foul magic is this? Hideous and perfect, drowned out by children singing.")
  • Larva, Pupa, Tank, Coffin is another line from "Sleep Now" ("I was not born, I was hatched. From larva, to pupa, tank to coffin.") and Surgically Atoned is from "Wreak Havoc" ('Made real, put into action, surgically atoned to perfection').
  • Carbon Beauty is a line from "Ditch The Rest" ("Torch the whole fucking nest, take the queen, ditch the rest. Carbon beauty, shred the lips, take the queen, ditch the rest.")
• The Alcoholic: Together, Angelspit manage to drink more on a daily basis than an entire university.
  • "Alcohol! Ten thousand dead vocalists can't be wrong."
• All There in the Manual: The video for "Vena Cava" is explained in their secret site, which concerns a secret society known as... Krankhaus. The site is shown in the video, and pictures from the video are shown on the site.
• Anti-Love Song: "Meat" and "Devilicious" could count as this.
  "We don’t want to write another whiny goth song about pill induced love…fuck knows there’s enough of them. The only love song we wrote was MEAT – which is about cannibalism." DestroyX, in this interview.
• Badass Boast: "You will know us by our trail of static!"
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The band asked the fans what they wanted to see in a future video, and how intense. The answer was a mix of horror and porn, very intense. The result was "Toxic Girl".
• Bilingual Bonus: "Fight Dirty" features a stanza in Italian, courtesy of Helalyn Flowers' Noemi Aurora.
• Brick Joke: The line "Falls from grace with a wallet full of HATE" from "Jugular" doesn't really make much sense until a few lines later, with "Revolt! Here’s your change, have a nice day".
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: ZooG's Facebook and Twitter pages are full of his philosophical comments, most of which tend to be quite profound and thoughtful... if you can understand what the hell he's talking about.
• Buffy Speak: On Twitter, ZooG refers to his Facebook page as his 'page thingy'.
• Careful with That Axe: "Wreak Havoc", "Wolf", "Vena Cava", "Fuck The Revolution", "Toxic Girl", "Catatonic", "Monkey Byte", "Sleep Now", "Hyperlust", "Twenty6Hundred"... the list goes on.
• Catchphrase:
  • 'Krank it up!'
  • Both members of Angelspit also use the word "ROCK!" to end most of their blogs, Facebook posts, et cetera.
• Cluster F-Bomb: "Lust Worthy" and "Fuck Fashion".
  • ZooG really loves the word fuck.
• Concept Album: Krankhaus. See the secret page for explanation of both the album and the video for "Vena Cava".
  • Hello My Name Is explores the occult of the Corporation and how it slowly kills you.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: They once threatened to take up country and western if their fans didn't vote for them in a contest.
• Cool Car: The hearse in the video for "Vena Cava".
• Darker and Edgier:

• The video for "Toxic Girl". The previous videos ("Vena Cava", "Fuck the Revolution" and "Sleep Now") were, on the whole, mind-screwy but not actually horrific. "Toxic Girl" was pretty much a horror movie with added sex.

• Dark Is Not Evil: Despite the appearance and lyrical content, Angelspit have a strong reputation as absolutely lovely people.
• Dark Reprise: The Angelspit remix of "Making Money". Both versions begin the same, but "Making Money" continues on with slow, dark music while the remix has music that sounds like a horde of pissed-off demonic bees.
• Delinquent Hair: ZooG's trademark mohawk.
• Double Entendre: The vocal hook for "Devilicious" is "Your body in my mouth, devilicious." While Word of God says that "Devilicious" is about cannibalism, the Double Entendre is still there.
• Driven to Suicide: The cover for "Hello My Name Is" is supposed to look like the words an insane employee would scrawl over the walls before killing themself.
• Everything Is an Instrument: They love this trope. They've turned random things (ranging from bowls to poles) into instruments and once built their own instrument and destroyed it so they could record the sounds it made. During the making of "As It Is In Heaven", one of their synths died, so they recorded the sounds it made and threw it in.

• The Faceless:
  • The Liar's face is obscured in most pictures/videos.
  • The cover of Blood Death Ivory has DestroyX's face obscured by a cross as a comment on image.
• Fractured Fairytale: "Paint Hell Red", "Wolf", and "Walking In The Woods", which are Angelspit's take on Little Red Riding Hood.

• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Around 1:57 into the "Toxic Girl" video, you can see several pieces of merch from several anime series in the Otaku's room - including a Haruhi Suzumiya shirt, and a Death Note bag.
  • There's also an Eraserhead poster on the wall behind the computer.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: ZooG's response to someone telling them to "go do something productive in life.. instead of dressing up like [a] neon tarantula".
  ZooG: "NEON TARANTULA" is the COOLEST name for a band!! Can someone please use this?
  • ZooG also said that 'Angst and the Revolution' would be a great name for a rock band.

• I Call It "Vera": Their modular synth, which they call The Middle Finger Of God.
• Idiosyncratic Album Theming: Every CD has at least one song that mentions or is about cannibalism. Every CD (excepting Black Kingdom, Red Kingdom (and now Hello My Name Is) has DestroyX on the cover and every CD has the colour black somewhere in the art.
  • The DestroyX pattern has now been broken with Hello My Name Is, which instead features ZooG.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Cannibalism comes up in a lot of their songs.

• The dress DestroyX wears in the "Sleep Now" video, to start.
• Her dress from the Blood Death Ivory cover.
• Her outfit from the Krankhaus artwork.
• Her 'geisha doll' outfit from the "Fuck the Revolution" video and Hideous and Perfect artwork.
• Basically, let's just say DestroyX, period. Not that ZooG doesn't look awesome, too.

• Instrumentals: "Black Wine", "On Earth", "Flesh Stitched Onto A Frame", "Hell Was Made Flesh", "Not Born, Hatched", "Massive", "Deadly", "Creeper"
• Intercourse with You:

• There's also the chorus of "Juicy", which goes in the later part of the song, "I'm feeling... lips/I'm feeling... cherry/I'm feeling... ripe/I'm feeling... (lickin', suckin', fuckin')/I'm feeling... juicy."
• And "Meat".
• "Defibrillator" has 'Lets go to la la la la la la and get naked/buy me a diamond pony and get uncensored'.

• Logic Bomb: They were voted worst new artist and best new artist simultaneously in Ritual Magazine's 2007 Reader Poll.
• Lyrical Dissonance: "Defibrillator" is a bright, peppy pop song with vicious, acidic lyrics about the club scenes and New York City.

• Mad Doctor:
  • "Vena Cava" has been explained as being about someone being operated on, alive and fully conscious, by an insane doctor with a medical fetish.
  • A lot of their visuals seem to have been inspired by this as well. It's justified for the album art of Krankhaus; see Concept Album.
  • "Nurse Grenade".
• Madness Mantra: "I love my cubicle, my little beige cubicle. I love my cubicle, my little padded cubicle. I love my cubicle, my little prison cubicle. Escalate and execute your brutal demise."
  • "You don't get it, you just don't get it."
• Magic Music: Parodied in "Make You Sin".

• "Toxic Girl". Enough said.

• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • DestroyX, anyone?
  • She's also known as Amelia Arsenic, which also counts.
  • The Liar is a milder example.
• Noodle Incident: DestroyX and Valerie had a slumber party. This ended with green hair dye on the sheets and a broken TV.
  • After hanging out with New Years Day, the latter ended up drawing a bloody pentagram on the floor of a church they played a gig at and trying to summon the spirit of David Lee Roth.

• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The fanbase was very curious as to why the band decided to tour with Blood On The Dance Floor, a crunk band (they wanted to do an all-ages gig, but due to the R-rated nature of their music, the only way was to tour with another band headlining. Well, that and BOTDF asked them (they're fans of Angelspit).)
  • Yes, because BOTDF's songs are so family-friendly.
    • They got to do all-ages concerts. Not many people are complaining. Besides, sex is one thing, cannibalism, murder and all-around gore is another.

• Precision F-Strike:
  • "This time, you're 100% FUCKED!"
  • "I needed motivation. You sent a postcard that said, 'Punk rock'. Well, fuck you too."

• Also "Making Money" and "Ditch The Rest", to a lesser extent.

• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: "Wreak havoc right! Now! Right! Now! Riot! Now! Wreak havoc right! Now! Right! Now! Riot! Now! Unleash hell!" from "Wreak Havoc"

• "Crash made! Built to fade! Fuck! The! Revolution! The money's real, but the blood is fake! Fuck! The! Revolution!"
• "Wolf", which has DestroyX and ZooG screaming 'Destroy! Destroy, fuck! Destroy, fuck me! Destroy, fuck me up!'
• "Don't get mad! Get even!"
• "You! Will! Obey me! You! Will! Become me! We! Will! Control you! Time for your medicine, baby!"
• "As! We! Watch the sunrise!"

• Rockers Smash Guitars: On Twitter, Valerie briefly wondered whether to smash her guitar on stage on the last show of the All the Rage tour, or sell it. (She sold it.)
• Rouge Angles of Satin: ZooG has misspelt 'vicious' as 'viscous' at least twice (once on the band's Twitter bio, and once on the official lyrics for 'Devilicious') and both times it's bloody hilarious. The guy needs to learn to proof-read.
• Shout-Out: "Bang bang, silver hammer" from "Jugular" is a Shout Out to The Beatles. DestroyX has also said that ZooG's outfit from the Hideous and Perfect album artwork/"Fuck the Revolution" video was inspired by A Clockwork Orange.
  • "On The List (She's Not)" was the name of one of the songs on Nine Inch Nails' 'album' Strobe Light.
• Slasher Smile: The subliminal shots in the beginning of the video for "Fuck the Revolution" are ZooG smiling such a smile.
• Stage Names: ZooG and DestroyX's real names are Karl Learmont and Amelia Tan, respectively.
• Step Up to the Microphone:
  • Most songs have both ZooG and DestroyX singing, or DestroyX alone. There aren't that many songs where ZooG is the primary singer ("Sleep Now", "Juicy", "Violence", "Sunrise" and "As It Is In Heaven"), but they're brilliant just the same.
  • "Toxic Girl", "Glitchbomb" and "Like It? Lick It!" are the only songs that have Valerie and Chris singing. OK, screaming.
• Surreal Music Video: All of them. All of them. None of them have anything to do with what the songs are about, all of them are works of art, and not a single one has a chance of not giving you nightmares.
• Take That!: A lot of their songs criticise something, whether it's fashion, governments, conformity or current policies.
• Titled After the Song: Their name came from a Sonic Youth song ("Orange Rolls, Angel's Spit").

• What Happened to the Mouse?: Two videos were meant to be released with Carbon Beauty- "Toxic Girl" and "Ditch The Rest". "Toxic Girl" has been released, but nothing has been said about "Ditch The Rest". It's like everyone forgot it existed.

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