Album titles like Sexplosion, Confessions of a Knife, and 13 Above The Night certainly describe the sticky landscape described in the creations of Groovy Mann, Buzz McCoy, and the revolving cast of band called MLWTTKK. Equal parts sleaze, exploitation, Satanism, sadism and disco, TTK has been painting music red and black since forming in 1987.

The duo of Mann and McCoy started the group as a collective aimed at creating a movie with the title they would eventually use as their band’s moniker. The movie would encompass the same themes their music would later embrace: sex, pornography, fast cars and faster women – very consciously following in the footsteps of filmmakers like John Waters and Russ Meyer.

Their first album, I See Good Spirits / I See Bad Spirits was the would-be soundtrack to the aborted film project. Released in 1988, it meshed thoroughly with the burgeoning Industrial Rock and Dance music scene, making use of many of the same motifs as contemporaries Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, and the more heavy metal focused White Zombie. Distorted guitars and vocals. Lots of heavy drum work, often left to the Roland 909 drum machine. Heavy use of movie samples, ranging from European trash cinema to late ‘70s sci-fi. The track that would see the most play in clubs and on college radio would be “And This Is What The Devil Does”. The lyrics are fine examples of the Kult’s sense of humor and embrace of all things taboo:

This man say I have needed to mend my unholy life
I fall to my knees praying, i find it hard and easy.

The group would follow ‘Spirits’ with a long EP in 1989 entitled Kooler Than Jesus. The album would include a few remixes of material from a pair of vinyl releases, one named for the band, one entitled “Some Have To Dance…. Some Have To Kill”. The title track Kooler Than Jesus would become one of the band’s greatest successes, particularly in dance clubs.

But what was arguably the Kult’s greatest achievement in music would come in 1991’s “Sexplosion!”. The album’s unabashedly nasty mix of lyrical sex and drug use took a decidedly more bacchanalian attitude, where other industrial music of the day was wrapping itself in ennui or anger. Campy, sleazy, leering and loungey, Sexplosion spawned what would become TKK’s biggest hit and most recognized song, Sex On Wheelz, which was featured in the Ralph Bakshi (and early Brad Pitt) film Cool World. The album also made more prominent use of disco and R ‘n B-style divas, as well as organs and horns, all adding to the campy feeling of the resulting tunes.

In 1994 TKK released the album 13 Above The Night, a dark trip through the underside of LA, complete with drugs, sadism, and occult practices. The production value had moved up due to the Kult’s bigger budget, perhaps enhanced even more by their cameo appearance both in the film and on the soundtrack of the hit movie The Crow. The songs follow a journey through whorehouses and drug dens, with tracks that mask stories of flirting that are edged with the reality of lost dreams and LONG lost innocence.

The last truly great TKK release, in my opinion, was 1995’s Hit And Run Holiday. It’s most prominent single, “Glamour Is A Rocky Road” is highly reminiscent of “Sex On Wheelz”, with surf-rock samples harkening to the ‘50s and ‘60s sleaze-kitsch that the Kult feeds so much of their music from. On a personal note, this tour’s stop in Minneapolis was the first live rock show I attended as a 15-year-old who had no idea what a Kult show would be like. I doubt the club (the infamous First Ave) would have let the Kult on stage at an all-ages event had it been known that the show’s opener, ex-porn-star Traci Lords, would jump on stage and begin beating a tied-up audience participant with a cat-o-nine-tails while pulling her shirt down. They say you never forget your first time…

The Kult’s live act includes a large cast of musicians, fire-breathers, performance artists and dancers, with a rotating group of diva/dancers known as the Bomb Gang Girlz always bringing up the side of the stage. The group toured with kindred spirits of the day Siouxsie and The Banshees, Lords of Acid, Ministry, KMFDM and Marilyn Manson, in some cases collaborating on small releases with their tour mates. This included the 1991 side project Excessive Force, which saw TKK’s Buzz McCoy team up with KMFDM’s frontman Sasha Konietzko.

After a decent album in 1997 called A Crime For All Season’s, TKK’s last proper studio album to date was 2001’s The Reincarnation of Luna. Luna was a bit disappointing, with songs that sounded more like remixes of earlier Kult work than an original album. The Kult also released an album in 2005, a shelved homage to disco music that had been on the shelf for nearly a decade, entitled Gay, Black and Married.

MLWTTKK has producing and performing a very unique brand of electronic music for 2 decades now, and has said that a new studio album is due out soon, tentatively titled The Filthiest Show In Town. I can only hope that I’ll get to see them do it up live again, 12 years after my first introduction to the Kult.