Revolting Cocks ‎- You Often Forget

Revolting Cocks were built on excess, but “You Often Forget” reveals the menace underneath the joke. Slow, narcotic, and deeply sleazy, it trades outright industrial assault for a groove that feels increasingly sinister the longer it runs.

Released in 1986 on Wax Trax! Records, “You Often Forget” belongs to the formative period of Revolting Cocks, the transatlantic industrial project initially assembled around Alain Jourgensen, Richard 23 of Front 242, and Luc Van Acker. What began as an unruly collision of Belgian electronic body music and Chicago’s emerging industrial underground quickly developed its own personality, one built from programmed rhythms, samples, distorted electronics, black humor, and deliberate provocation.

“You Often Forget” demonstrates the less frantic side of that formula. A heavy, repetitive bass groove anchors the track while percussion and electronics gradually accumulate around it. Van Acker’s vocal brings a detached, decadent quality to the arrangement, making the song feel simultaneously seductive and vaguely threatening. Rather than exploding forward, it lurches and crawls, turning repetition into tension.

That atmosphere made the track a natural fit for the Wax Trax! world of the mid-’80s, where the boundaries between industrial, EBM, post-punk, experimental electronics, and underground dance music were still remarkably porous. Revolting Cocks embodied that cross-pollination particularly well, sharing personnel and creative DNA with Ministry while retaining the influence of Belgium’s electronic scene.

This 1986 U.S. Wax Trax! 12-inch gives “You Often Forget” the space its hypnotic construction deserves. The extended format emphasizes the rhythm, repetition, and studio manipulation that made early RevCo records so effective in alternative clubs, offering a particularly strong example of industrial music functioning as dance music without sanding away any of its grime.

“You Often Forget” captures Revolting Cocks before the project expanded into the increasingly chaotic ensemble heard on later records. Dirty, hypnotic, mechanical, and unmistakably Wax Trax!, it’s early industrial club music with its collar open and bad intentions written all over its face.