The tracks that make up WELT were initially going to be released in 1995 on Rick Rubin's American Recordings imprint, but a quagmire of legal travails and record-biz egos kept the project on the shelf permanently. It wasn't until 1999, when the re-record clause from the original American deal expired, that Ogre and former Ruby programmer/producer Walk could remake the record for another label. The holding pattern that the duo were forced into allowed them to re-examine and refine what they had originally committed to tape. The luxury of "realtime hindsight" makes WELT an engaging listen from start to finish.

"Thirteen years ago I didn't know much about music, except that it had to have a lot of emotion," says Ogre. "I probably suffer from having too much emotion. Mark pulls a lot of that back in and makes me focus. A lot of the compositions on this record, through no fault of my own, have gone through this process of being cast aside and then having been reworked. Through that I've learned a process which is the metamorphosis of ideas into songs."

The 11 songs on WELT blend into a unique cohesive vision, expanding and decimating the various boundaries and cliches that run rampant in much of today's electronic-based music. Yet within the layers of coruscating technical gadgetry at work lie a rich bounty of melodies that remain etched in your cortex long after the CD leaves the player. The opening track "Water" busts out with a funk groove and a confident Ogre vocal. The majestic dirge of "Kettle" is anthemic in its execution, while the rapid pulsing "Pore," is equal parts adrenaline and diet pills, with its bent circuitry and Ogre's excited mechano-staccato plowing through more alien territory than what's found in a hipster's arcane electronica collection. From the percolating '80s electro of "Cracker" (a scathing indictment of empty culture merchants) to the closing Puppy-with-the-distortion-off denouement of "Minus," WELT is filled with synthetic grooves, engaging atmospheres and assorted manifestations of Ogre's twisted imagination.

While he is rightfully proud of his body of work with Skinny Puppy and the various projects that followed, Ogre feels much more creatively fulfilled with Walk in ohGr, exploring other avenues in the realm of electronic-based rock music.. "I'm way more involved with this record than I ever was with Skinny Puppy," the singer admits. "Because there's only Mark, it's a two way thing.. Underneath all the electronics, the doo dads, the whoops and the filters, there's songs. I've never worked with anybody who would completely explore so many possibilities of a riff or a part and create so many options to choose from. There's a lot of real detail workÑreally subtle things that pop out. Mark's really into the idea if you're going to have a song on the record it should mean something."

But before you experience a single note of the duo's shapeshifting vibrations, you can immediately sense that ohGr is different, solely at face value. The album's bizarre cover depicts, in the singer's words, "a strange little human dog creature forced to stare at its own spine and brain. It almost seems like it's having a heart attack." It was designed by longtime Ogre fave Roman Dirge, the graphic artist behind the comic book Lenore. In a moment of self-deprecation, the singer jokes that the dog, "looks a lot like me.... well, some of the time!" After five years of hurry-up-and-wait torment, crippling self-doubt and the day-to-day exigencies of real life, Ogre is ready to make an impact on the music world again.