Welcome to the Playground
Welcome to the Playground - 1999

Dirty
Down
Skin Doctors
Legends Die
He's Coming
You Don't Know Me
Welcome to the Playground
Prepare to Die
Taste of My Mind
Undecided
Review from The Edge-Online
What is there to say about one of the top three industrial releases of 1999? This album is fantastic, fabulous, outstanding, great, full-on. Give me a Thesaurus, I’ll keep going. The guitar loops and effect-isized vocals combine to make this album an absolute must have for anyone with a hard edge bent. The Doctrine has improved on a great style, producing an album with a more refined, cleaner sound.
From the slowly escalating guitars found in the lead-in to the first track, my volume maxed out and my neighbors got intimate with Jagged Doctrine. The first two tracks, Dirty and Down, duke it out for number one favorite on the album. The tracks are a great example of where the band has the sound nailed, as the songs take the listener between the states of intense and extreme, absorbing one into a raging sea of guitar riffs, tribal drums, growling vocals, and effects. Poetics aside, the layers and loops are simply amazing.
Skin Doctors shows off the doctrine side of the band, as an excellent expose into the world of cosmetic surgery. ‘Yeah, you might be looking good, but how’s your soul and your mind?’ Legends Die keeps things going with some cool pulsating electronics between the guitar laden choruses. The track reinforces a concept found scattered throughout the album, reinforcing the humanness of the artist, making the album’s message relevant and tangible to most of us.
The album’s first instrumental, He’s Coming, has an Egyptian feel to it, and escalates and changes through layers of guitars and electronics to make it worth repeating the experience many times over. You Don’t Know Me starts out with a quick, industrial beat, setting the pace for the cry of so many that are misunderstood by those wanting to categorize and generalize for ease of preaching, without getting to the personal side of things.
The title track caught me off guard, with the rap-core style vocals of the trademark guitars and, dare I say, scratching. It all combines to make for a great encounter. Prepared To Die is dark and brooding to match the title and message. ‘If this world goes under, am I prepared to die?’ I love the message behind Taste Of My Mind, as the slow rolling verse and driving chorus as ‘Do you want a taste of my mind?’. Maybe with a bit of ketchup, it’ll taste just like chicken...
The track ends with a short two and a half minute fast and heavy instrumental, Undecided. Undecided about what, I don’t know, but its not about the quality of the album, that’s for sure. It’s no wonder that the editors at Rolling Stone magazine placed a Jagged Doctrine tune in the top five for unsigned bands in early 1999.