UNDERWORLD LEADERS: My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult brings shock-rock to the Blank.

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult's show at the Blank Club Wednesday night was like a time warp all the way back to the late '80s, when Chicago's Wax Trax label defined the goth-industrial scene with bands like Ministry, KMFDM, Laibach Meat Beat Manifesto and the Trent Reznor-fronted side project 1000 Homo DJs.

My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult was one of the most important groups in that scene. Their debut I See Goods Spirits and I See Bad Spirits landed a full year before Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine, and while Thrill Kill Kult's music was more beat-driven, it was impossible not to notice how much Reznor seemed to borrow from TKK lead singer Groovie Mann's vocal style, and certainly the head-to-toe black leather look.

And yet, though they influenced countless other electronic-industrial bands, Thrill Kill Kult's legacy has largely been lost. While I loved the Sexplosion! era of sleazy industrial dance they shifted into in the early 90s, a lot of people forgot their harder, darker early stuff.

On this tour, they clearly meant to remind them. Mann and fellow founder Buzz McCoy—joined by a fantastic backing guitarist and drummer who nailed it all night—played their Wax Trax!-era songs almost exclusively. There were only two songs from their entire output between 1990 and 2010, Sexplosion's "Leathersex" and the 1992 fan favorite from the soundtrack to The Crow, "After the Flesh."

They did play a few songs from their 2010 album, Death Threat, but it was remarkable how well the new songs fit in with the early stuff. For instance, they opened with the fairly obscure early song "Shock of Point 6," which flowed seamlessly into the title track from the new album. They've definitely returned to their roots on this record, as "Death Threat" sounds a little bit like "Do You Fear For Your Child," one of their most popular early faves that they broke out two songs later. In fact, they played pretty much all the great ones from that era—"And This Is What the Devil Does," "Days of Swine and Roses," "A Daisy Chain for Satan," "Cuz It's Hot," even "Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness." No "Kooler Than Jesus," but in a way, that and other lighter Wax Trax songs like "Devil Bunnies" wouldn't have fit in this set. It was all about their hardest, scariest stuff, and hopefully this tour will make everyone remember what menace, power and influence these songs had. They certainly couldn't deliver them any better, with Mann and McCoy both in top form and raining down pure infectious darkness all night.