New Musical Express : 15 Oktober 1983

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SPK: Metal Dance (Desire)

I'd be the last to recommend the unpleasantness of actually listening to the stuff, but if the new breed of industrial metallurgists are intent on formulating a new aesthetic, a separate dwelling place from which they plan to pounce and trounce the blandness and inertia of contemporary youth music, then their ideals may have a strategic value. But SPK, rather than keeping their threatening iron in fire long enough for it to be like an undertaker's rod onto a corpse, compromise shamelessly. Their metal core becomes a trivial, novel accoutrement as they plough through an ordinary slice of white compu-funk. This is sort of Set The Tone with spikes. Hey! are we going backwards or what?
"This is a strange new sound," they bleat. Sounds like a bloody school field trip! So they look fetching to Face readers who couldn't get down to Skin 2, and if you're anxious enough you can dance to it, but it's still stricken by the all embracing blight of pop populism - it causes no threat, demands no change, stakes no claims.