William Bennett on the forthcoming album Cruise (SLCD024)

The basic concept of 'Cruise' is one of stretching the listeners' tolerance to the absolute maximum and then going even further. This new music will really be a severe test of people's patience; it is very intense, totally unremitting and will almost certainly outstay its welcome. A lot of people are going to have a hard time getting to the end of the tracks, it's going get on a lot of people's nerves. Many people who are currently interested in Whitehouse may drift away not liking this new record. But that's not to say that lots of new people will like it - I doubt that will be the case either. I think we could lose a lot of fans with this new release. It's strange, but very, very sinister stuff - more than people would believe and will go well beyond what would normally be tolerated.

Some of the songs demonstrate an evolution of the basic style featured on songs like 'A Cunt Like You' - it's what I describe as a sort of 'ultra' style - these include 'Dance The Desperate Breath', 'Princess Disease' and 'Cruise (Force The Truth)'. As I mentioned before the overall approach is unbearably intense, unremitting at times, almost sounding rhythmic (although never achieving a beat) thus it has a sort of extreme and hypnotic quality. The vocals on these 'ultra' tracks are almost unbearably intense - they really will try the listeners' patience in their relentlessness and unrivalled levels of hysteria and frenzy. The general feedback from the listeners of all this will certainly be very interesting.

The album will include 'Movement 2000', a track already made available at mp3.com. There'll also be a new track 'Public' recorded by Peter Sotos with Albini that will pretty much be along the lines of 'Private' from 'Mummy And Daddy'. Despite the controversy and no small amount of negative feedback we received for 'Private', personally, I feel this kind of track is a great foil for the other more 'musical' tracks on a Whitehouse album. There were some people that were positive about this kind of development although, I have to be honest, most were negative - nevertheless I'm sticking by my own convictions and my opinion is that 'Public' will be the best representation of this genre so far.

William Bennett (December 2000 - January 2001)

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