At the Rickshaw Theatre on Tuesday, November 3

At the risk of stating the fairly obvious, Skinny Puppy’s timing was a little off for its first Vancouver concert in nearly two decades. In a world where the stars are always perfectly aligned, the electro-industrial legends would have pulled into the Rickshaw Theatre on Halloween night.

Missing that target by three days didn’t seem to matter to singer Nivek Ogre, however. Making a punishingly loud return to the city that was once his home, the frontman treated the primed-to-the-max faithful to a show that was—to the surprise of no one—as much about theatrics as it was the music.

Never one to miss the chance to play dress-up, Ogre made his grand entrance in a getup that would have given a young Marilyn Manson a major chub. A towering white Princess of the Coneheads hat was offset by what looked like bloody oven mitts, a gleaming butcher-style apron, crimson-streaked white pants, and an elaborate death mask that suggested Predator crossed with the sand people from Star Wars and the postapocalyptic scavengers from The Road Warrior.

Determined to put on a show in the truest sense of the term, Ogre didn’t exactly roar onto the stage. Instead, as keyboardist-programmer cEvin Key and drummer Justin Bennett unleashed a flat-out-deadly barrage of full aural carnage, the singer shuffled out clinging for dear life to a rest-home-style metal walker. Giving the proceedings a DIY feel that was part performance art and part Holy Body Tattoo dance company, this would be traded in for a metal cane, which was eventually whipped aside so the singer could prowl the stage like a possessed version of the thing under the stairs.

And the metamorphosis didn’t stop there. The towering hat was quickly discarded when Ogre climbed into a metal cage that was placed on-stage complete with a closed-circuit camera. After spending much of a thumping “Dogshit” doing a pretty good impersonation of the puppet from Saw crossed with a full-blown nightmare, another layer of the mask was discarded to reveal something that looked like a burn victim slathered in a mixture of headcheese and refrigerated bacon fat.

Through it all, video monitors and a movie-screen backdrop featured a nonstop blitzkrieg of digitally manipulated video images, ranging from military bombing exercises to bubbling tar pits to burning mountains. It was all a little too much to take in, even for the most ADHD–afflicted of concertgoers, mostly because you didn’t know where to look. If, for example, you caught yourself gawking at the images of vintage muscle cars during “Rodent”, you missed the sight of Ogre tapping a vein and gushing fake blood all over the Plexiglas doors of his cage. If you were transfixed by the sight of him staggering around the stage during “Assimilate”, his back-in-place Conehead belching white smoke, you missed the burning crosses blaring across the screens in the background.

Somewhere in the middle of all the mayhem there was music, all of it expertly delivered by the band that pretty much invented a blueprint that’s been ripped off by everyone from Ministry to Nine Inch Nails. The biggest roar of the night came for the dance-floor-destroying “Assimilate”, but that high point was matched at least a half-dozen times, including the full-synth-metal-jacket exercise in religion-bashing blasphemy that was “ugLi” and the vicious, almost-tribal marauder that was “Tormentor”.

Major disappointments included the almost-unforgivable omission of “Tin Omen”, which remains Skinny Puppy’s most scarily savage moment. It all ended with a grinning Ogre reappearing for the triumphant blast down memory lane that was “Far Too Frail”. He performed without a mask, which was somehow fitting. After all, despite what was going on on-stage, it’s not like this was Halloween.