A Year of Blind Spots: Post Orgasmic Chill

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Post Orgasmic Chill

Skunk Anansie

1999

What 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die has to say about Post Orgasmic Chill by Skunk Anansie:

After two warmly received albums with independent label One Little Indian, the arrival of Skunk Anansie's major-label debut was expected to see the agit-rockers breakthrough into the big-time.

Virgin forked out the cash to send the band to the plush Bearsville Studios and Clinton Studios in New York to record their highly anticipated third LP. But, despite a headlining slot at Glastonbury Festival, 1999 failed to be the year many believed the band deserved.

Vocalist Skin, with her shaved head and fearless tirades, had become the mouthpiece of British black-feminist rage; tracks like the opening "Charlie Big Potato" set the self-appointed egocentric male hierarchy firmly in its sights, and in turn the tone for the album. Q referred to it as "sonic warfare fed through speakers."

But the band had become accustomed to reaching the extremes of heaven and hell, and proved equally at home on quieter tracks, forsaking political fury for reflection and contemplation. Skin's emotive voice soars alongside epic string arrangements on tracks "You'll Follow Me Down" and "Lately," while "Secretly" is a passionate response to infidelity.

By Post Orgasmic Chill, the band had started to stretch their sound, and new influences, such as drum 'n' bass, had burrowed into their established indie rock. The rough edges of previous records had been worn away to pull together their vulnerability and brutish force in equal measure and with deft subtlety.

Although Post Orgasmic Chill proved beyond doubt to be Skunk Anansie's swan song, it remains a triumphant statement on which to bow out.

What Joe has to say about Post Orgasmic Chill by Skunk Anansie:

It's important to know the context of my listening experience, that's why I keep saying this in almost every Blind Spot entry (and most Film Club entries too, now that I think about it)—I don't read anything about these things before I engage with them for the first time. There are some that I know about a little bit just from pop culture osmosis, but other that I know nothing about. No idea about Skunk Anansie, and had never even heard of them till I randomly chose them from 1001 Albums.

But because of that, there then occasionally arrives a moment during that first engagement that requires me to pause everything and look it up before I move any further. With Post Orgasmic Chill, I heard the the n-word multiple times in that second song ("On My Hotel T.V."), and I didn't have any way to figure out whether this was a treatise on race by a Black woman or some kinda nazi shit by a white woman. It was a simple google. Sigh of relief—Skin, the lead singer, seems to know what she's doing here, and what she's doing is something that I can wholeheartedly back. (I guess I'm particularly sensitive this week after seeing the n-word dropped pretty casually by James Joyce in Ulysses.)

Overall, I didn't really know what to expect based on the silly band name and the even sillier album title (no explanation for each in the short time that I went looking). I probably didn't expect something adjacent to nü-metal. Maybe due to my expectations being upended, I ended up liking the heavy guitars and intense vocals on this thing a lot. There are songs that slow it down, and those are mediocre, but the big moments, something like "We Don't Need Who You Think You Are," those fucking rip.

So what's up? Why have I never heard of this band or its charismatic and mononymously named  frontwoman? Pretty simple, actually. I am listening today because 1001 Albums is intensely Eurocentric, so of course they are going to focus on a lot of artists who made it big in the U.K., even if they never made it big in the U.S. Skunk Anansie is one of those bands. And because I live in the U.S. and have no reason to be similarly Eurocentric, I would have no reason to know a band like this. But why weren't they big in the U.S.? My gut reaction to it is that rock-metal-alt spaces were not accepting of a Black woman, or at the very least the tastemakers who might typically import British entertainment were the racist ones, or something like that. It's just a theory, and probably a weak one, since I'm viewing a 1999 album through a 2025 lens, and shit is a lot different now, in ways both better and much worse.

All of that is window-dressing, though. I don't know if I have much to say about the music itself though, beyond the fact that it's some cool rock 'n' roll that I probably would've never discovered if it weren't for this book (and you, if it were not for this blog). Here's something though—the book is outdated. Published in 2005, it would have no way of knowing that Post Orgasmic Chill was not Skunk Anansie's swan song, and that they got back together in 2009 and have since made four albums, including one this past spring! So this answers a question you might have about their popularity—are they well-known? Enough to make a success comeback, at least.