My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - I See Good Spirits And I See Bad Spirits

Before the sleazy dance-floor excess of Sexplosion! and the acid-fueled madness of Confessions Of A Knife..., My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult were already creating their own twisted universe of religious hysteria, horror-movie samples, and hypnotic industrial grooves. Their 1988 debut, I See Good Spirits And I See Bad Spirits, introduced one of the strangest and most entertaining acts to emerge from Chicago's Wax Trax! underground.

Originally conceived as a film project by Groovie Mann and Buzz McCoy, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult quickly evolved into something far more interesting. Their fascination with exploitation cinema, occult imagery, and underground electronic music became the foundation for a sound that blended industrial experimentation with psychedelic rock, primitive house rhythms, and a wicked sense of humor.

Released through Wax Trax! Records in 1988, I See Good Spirits And I See Bad Spirits established the band's signature approach: repetitive electronic grooves, distorted vocals, sinister synthesizers, and samples pulled from the more disreputable corners of popular culture. Where many of their industrial contemporaries favored confrontation and mechanical aggression, Thrill Kill Kult seemed equally interested in making people dance, laugh, and question what exactly they were hearing.

“First Cut” opens the album with an ominous atmosphere, introducing the band's fascination with religious imagery and cinematic sound design. “Shock of Point 6” brings a more aggressive electronic pulse, while “Resisting the Spirit” and “The Devil Does Drugs” demonstrate their talent for combining provocative samples with irresistible industrial dance rhythms.

The latter became one of the band's early signature tracks, its combination of mechanical percussion, distorted voices, and psychedelic menace perfectly capturing the anything-goes spirit of the original Wax Trax! era.

Elsewhere, “On This Rack” and “Gateway to Hell” lean further into the album's darker, more experimental atmosphere. The arrangements are often deliberately sparse, allowing repetition, unusual samples, and abrasive textures to create an unsettling sense of momentum.

What makes the album particularly fascinating is how fully formed the band's identity already was. The elements that would define their subsequent releases are all present, although the production is noticeably rawer and the atmosphere more overtly sinister than the funk and disco-influenced direction they would eventually pursue.

The record also captures a pivotal moment in American industrial music, when Chicago's Wax Trax! scene was bringing together European EBM, underground dance culture, punk, and experimental electronics. Thrill Kill Kult absorbed those influences but approached them with a theatrical irreverence that made them immediately recognizable.

I See Good Spirits And I See Bad Spirits remains an essential starting point for understanding the band's evolution. Dark, hypnotic, gloriously tasteless, and packed with warped electronic rhythms, it's a debut that helped establish industrial dance music's more decadent and mischievous possibilities.