Apparently this ep was banged-out failry quickly at Steve Austin's studio, Austin Enterprises. Considering where it was recorded, the sound is fairly straight-ahead. On their 1998 record GUTTER QUEEN, Cable threw down some pretty muscular noise rock. Apparently they've decied ot move away from that a bit. I haven't heard their most recent full-length (2001's NORTHERN FAILURES), but I'm told that it has a heavy Sabbath vibe. If that's the case, then this ep would continue in that vein -- except that there's a bit of 70s hard rock feel to some of these songs. 'Course, it would be 70s hard rock as interpreted by a group of wasted sludge-rockers. Songs like "Whiskey Drinkin' Woman" and "Ride the Jackass Backwards" sound like the more driving Zeppelin songs like "Whole Lotta Love" and "When the Levee Breaks" truncated and filtered through the Buzzov'en/Sour Vein aesthetic. "Buy Me a Drink" is the "road ballad" (a la Bon Jovi's "Dead or Alive") dragged through the gutter. [n/a]

Cake-Like -- DELICIOUS [Avant]

OK, so there's this band called Cake-Like and they're signed to John Zorn's Japanese label Avant and they're from NYC and they're three really attractive women, one of whom is the only funny person on MTV's THE STATE (that would be singer/guitarist Kerri Kenney), and John Zorn "executive-produced" (whatever the hell that means), and i know that the entire nation -- nay, NATIONS -- have been lying awake at night until four in the morning, millions of people tearing out their hair in great nasty handfuls, moaning to the ceiling, "Cake-Like... i hear so much about them... but what... what are they LIKE?" Well, i'll TELL you what they're like! They're like the 3Ds arm-wrestling with Helium while Zeni Geva kicks the table and God Is My Copilot run around the table like little hooligans screaming weird nursery rhymes at the top of their tiny li'l lungs! They're like tiny voodoo Barbie dolls raised on equal shots of Billie Holiday and crunchy punk! They're like a catchy pop band with chime-chime guitars possessed by the flickering spirits of the Great White Noise God! They're like a chocolate-covered candy bar laced with bitter almonds on the inside! And they play REALLY LOUD!

If you deduce from the above that i like them a lot, then... uh... you deduce CORRECTLY.

Mostly what they do is present short (VERY short -- 11 songs in under 30 minutes) songs that apparently started out as simple pop ditties only to end up buried in irregular, jagged blasts of punked-out white noise and semi- jazzy bits. It makes perfect sense for them to be signed to Zorn's label, although they're far more direct and "accessible" than anything Zorn's ever been involved with. On top of the pop/noise axis, they spike everything with sing-song lyrics, quite often nursery-rhyme style, that sound cute at first glance until you pay a bit more attention and realize what they're actually SAYING, at which point your milk may curdle a wee bit. For instance, the loopy-sounding "fruitcake" sounds about as childish as you can get, until you realize that the lyrics about pirates drinking wine and tucking children in for the night is actually about having drunks for parents. On "bum leg," the little girl shunned by the neighborhood for being crippled turns right around and does the exact same thing to a girl even lower on the totem pole than herself ("every day she would say / want to come out to play? / i'd love to Sheila, but i can't / because your dad works for my dad"). Then there's "sweet 15," about dirty old men trying to pick up 15-year olds... the list goes on and on. Like the real-life tribulations of childhood, what sounds cute and sunny on the surface here turns out to be anchored to a chain buried at the bottom of a deep, cold river where the fish bite.

Cake-Like -- "mr. fireman/come & play/paco's last return" [Genius Records]

Ah, another swank offering from New York's most fabulous trio, the totally boss Cake-Like. The basic format remains much the same -- chiming guitars battle with noise-landen, overamped fuzz guitars while Kerri and co. yelp and wail in sing-song fashion -- but this time the sound is a bit thicker, most likely due to a switch in producers (to Ric "mr. preying mantis" Ocasek, of all people). "mr. fireman" is the standout (gee, that must be why it's the A-side, huh?), all ching-ching guitars with occasional bursts of squalling noise as Kerri exclaims about being all hot and bothered for a fireman (at least i THINK that's what it's about). On the flip side, "come & play" starts out slow and heavy but picks up the pace (and the noise quotient) about halfway through, reminding me oddly of Shiva Speedway; by contrast, "paco's last return" is just damn weird, opening with an eerie acapella chant before a horribly sped-up flamenco guitar accompanies a heavily-accented, spoken-word story about Paco and his search for the round Rosa, who turns out to be married to a man "even bigger than Paco." Uh... okay.... whatever you say, Kerri... mmm hmmm....

Cake-Like -- BRUISER QUEEN [Vapor Records]

Thick sheets of snow screamed across the frigid wasteland. Glaciers, like pale gleaming monuments to a forgotten age, rose to a sun whose warmth failed to penetrate the howling snowstorm. Lost in the tundra, miles from the nearest Antarctic outpost, Captain 4-Track and TASCAM-Girl -- freezing in their skimpy spandex crimefighting outfits -- argued about whose fault it REALLY was that the Hypercube Flandez Time Module crashed and left them stranded in this godforsaken whiteness.

"I say it's YOUR fault," she screamed, her voice barely audible above the howling wind. "It was YOUR turn to put gas in the fucker."

"MY turn? MY turn? I've stopped at the Shell station the last four times!"

"Yeah, whatever. So what the hell are we going to do now?"

"We march." He pointed into the distance; she saw nothing but a wall of blinding white. "The internal radar spectrogasmotonometer tells me that a top-secret government outpost, currently unknown to all but a few select secret agents and funded out of a CIA slush fund, is only 2.4 miles away. We'll head there and get the fuel necessary to get our ship back on the ground so we can continue in our mission to kick somebody's ass."

"Oh, okay. So whose ass are we kicking this time, anyway?"

"I forget. It's written down in the logbook...."

"Well, seeing as how we're moving about three feet per minute, i figure we'll have plenty of time to check this out." She pulled out a portable CD player and inserted a disc.

"Whose fine new album shall we be listening to, then?"

"The new one by Cake-Like. I'm not so sure I'm all that impressed with it, but I left the Swans reissue back on the ship, so we're stuck with it for the moment."

"You mean to say that it's a flaccid followup to their stunning Avant debut, DELICIOUS?"

"Well... here's the deal: Their first album was such a fluke sleeper hit that the major labels apparently glommed onto them, and so they signed with a sneaky subsidiary of Warner/Reprise. Check out this slick artwork, man. Doesn't this just scream "arty major label concept of what some A&R guys thinks is alternative" or what?"

"Mein gott, the artwork is on a YELLOW background... how... hideous."

"I like the flies fucking, though. That was a nice touch."

"So how is the MUSIC?"

"About the same as the first disc, only with all the periodic noise eruptions and brutal energy all sanded away for a more user-friendly approach. In other words, not quite so much fun. Plus the version of "mr. fireman" here is nowhere near as crazed and energetic as the version from the single. Boo hoo. It's still pretty cool, though. In fact, this whole disc is fine on its own merits; it's just that the first disc makes it look kind of weak by comparison...."

"Surely you must admit that Kerri Kenney gets a magnificent bass tone all over the place."

"Oh yeah, and the stern-mother stuff on "mr. fireman" is absolutely hysterical, along with the line where she's screaming "bring your goddamn truck and some water!" But the nasty fuzzed-out guitar has been pushed waaaaay back, and that's the formula for everything on this disc: the whole business of minimizing the dirty, chaotic stuff that made them so interesting in the first place is what bugs me."

"Hmmm... there does seem to be an overabundance of pretty and girly- girl stuff happening... wait, this song "lorraine's car" is reasonably out of control. They're doing lots of shouting and making strange noises on this one...."

"Yah, if the rest of the album were as consistently energized as this and "mr. fireman," they'd have a winner. As it is, we have to assume that something got lost in the translation due to major label diddling. And what the FUCK is she saying on "the american woman" anyhow? Dammit, i FAILED French, and i'm sure as hell not going out and buying a dictionary.... On the other hand, "truck stop hussy" manages to be pretty, heavy, nasty, and smutty all at the same time, plus she's really yelping there, so maybe things aren't so bad after all... plus it's really kind of funny...."

The disc played as they walked. Eventually she said, "So how far are we from the damn place now? I've got to pee."

"Uh... let's see... by my calculations, we'll reach the outpost in just under two hours."

"Wonderful."

"So how did we end up reviewing this disc, anyway?"

"The ubermaggot was too busy gloating over the Pere Ubu box set to do it himself, I guess."

This is a three-song demo that is punishing! The first thing that needs to be said is that these guys are highly original. They mix some old-school hardcore brutality with killer doom-filled breakdowns. Fuck the trends. The artwork and lyrics are far more creative than ANY band I have seen or heard in the last handful of years. People get scared when they play live... you might get fucked up. You will be hearing more from this band, as I am sure they will get picked up by a label and destroy everyone in their path. [TTBMD]

Cards in Spokes -- REACT [Allied]

In a nutshell: Fast, tense, catchy harmonic punkpop. Think Green Day, Offspring, Ramones, Rancid, the Clash with a better singer (no offense Joe, "character" is okay with me), that sort of thing. The songs are reasonably short and high on energy, and they erect a pretty serious wall of sound for a three-piece unit. Betcha they smoke live. The only catch is that, for the most part, the songs don't really stand out from one another; it's all one big blur of motion that periodically stops for a few seconds before starting up again. Some people might find that, ah, irritating. Given the genre, i'm not sure this is actually that much of a drawback -- after all, the Ramones basically knew two songs (the fast one and the faster one) and they managed to extend that into a twenty-plus year career.

"Faces on File," the first blast of energy, pretty much lays out the blueprint -- stingray guitar, bom-bom bass, relentless drums, high velocity everything. These elements -- which sound just fine, incidentally -- don't vary much over the course of eleven songs (although there are a couple of exceptions). Regardless, i'm inclined to cut them a bit of slack since their lyrics are not only snotty, but considerably more intelligent than the average punkpop fare, and the lyrics to "Towel in a Turban" (which manage to work in a humorous cleavage reference) are pretty funny. And they DO have a serious level of energetic catchiness happening. Ah, if they'd just work on making the songs stand out from each other a bit more....

Some exceptions: "When You Find Yourself" benefits from pulling back on the speed and employing a bit of twisted funk, and "Scratch the Dance Itch" works on a similar level for the same reason. "React" takes on a different drum sound and puts a bit more space in the mix, and as a result the song stands out even though, musically, it's not remarkably different from the rest of the album. Which may be the real hidden weakness here -- if they'd changed things up in the mix a bit more often they might have achieved a bit more variety in the songs. Ah well, it's still hard to beat that energy....

Cas de Marez - CATHEDRALE DE CHANT (Barooni)

Cas de Marez is a Dutch vocal artist who explores the range of vocal expressions in order to form a "language of sound". This disc is a one-hour slice from a fifteen-hour performance for voice and multitrack recorder in 1990. Because the relationship between sound and space are crucial to her work, she uses a technique that makes allowances for overtones. For the first hour of the performance, a basic track of tones and inflections was recorded. This was then played back and added to with a new series of tones that were introduced as variations of increasing timbre. In the end, this process was repeated until there were fifteen separate voices. Absolutely stunning and beautiful. At a certain point, the voices start to meld and unexplicable aural changes take place as one's mind is transported to another state of being. [yol]

Neko normally records for Mint (where she has a nifty new album out right now, in fact), but here she's doing a bit of homegrown recording on her own with a spot o' help from Lance Rock Records. The results aren't too different from her usual albums -- we are firmly in alt-country territory here from the word go -- but they're a bit more spare and direct here, less "produced" (which i vastly prefer), and the songs are easily the equal or better of anything else she's done. For an album that was done at home (by Neko with help form Jon Rauhouse) it sure sounds good -- better, to my ears, than a lot of mainstream overproduced "big sound" albums floating around. (Of course, it's easier to make good-sounding albums with musicians who actually know what they're doing, which helps immensely here in overcoming any recording limitations.) The eight songs here are all excellent, a mix of new songs ("Make Your Bed," "Favorite"), songs from other pals ("Andy," "In California," "Knock Loud"), swank covers (Neil Young's "Dreaming Man," Hank Williams' "Alone and Forsaken"), and a public domain tune ("Poor Ellen Smith") reinterpreted Neko-style. I find it utterly hilarious that it takes a Canadian to do the sound of rural Americana right. Grab this if you see it, because it's hard to find -- intended mainly for Neko to sell on tours in Canada, as i understand it, and available only on vinyl to my knowledge. If you're down with Neko at all then you need this album.

This is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant box set, in every way imaginable. Four cds of previously unreleased music and one disc constituting a "best-of" for the four American Recordings releases, all housed in an exceptional package. It's not cheap, true, but you get what you pay for, hmmm? And what you get here is pretty swank. One square cloth-bound hardback book labeled TEXT is 100+ pages of interviews, articles, pictures, and explanations of the recordings (as a process and for each of the collected songs); another matching book labeled MUSIC holds five discs in cardboard sleeves, prefaced by the printed technical notes and track listings for the cds. Both books are housed in a sturdy cloth-covered slipcase. All of it looks beautiful... and black.

This box set is unusual in that, unlike most sets, almost none of the music here has been previously released. When Rick Rubin and Johnny Cash began recording together ten years ago, they established a pattern early on of trying (and often recording) an enormous number of songs; they recorded over a hundred during sessions for the first album alone, followed by several hundred others during the sessions for the subsquent three releases. Sometimes Cash played alone, and sometimes with backing musicians as diverse as the Heartbreakers, Glen Campbell, Joe Strummer, and Nick Cave; sometimes he sang his own material and sometimes he covered artists like Soundgarden, Danzig, Vera Lynn (!), Neil Young, Sting (!!), and Nine Inch Nails (!!!). Regardless of the circumstances, he appears to have been highly engaged in the process and sufficiently motivated to keep working steadily even after the complete ruin of his health and the death of his wife. The result is a staggering wealth of recordings, the best of which Cash and Rubin hand-picked for this collection. (Signing off on the final track listing and details was one of the last things Cash did before he died, and probably the only reason he held out that long after June's death.)

The first three discs -- "Who's Gonna Cry," "Trouble In Mind," and "Redemption Songs" -- feature an eclectic assembly of tracks roughly grouped thematically under these evocative headings. Some of the more interesting ones scattered throughout include dark readings of his own work ("Long Black Veil," "Understand Your Man," and an early take of "The Man Comes Around"), peculiar covers (Neil Young's "Pocahontas" and "Heart of Gold," "You Are My Sunshine," and "You'll Never Walk Alone"), some inspired covers ("Big Iron," "Wichita Lineman," "Cindy" -- with Nick Cave, "Devil's Right Hand," "Casey's Last Ride," and a duet with Carl Perkins on "Brown Eyed Handsome Man"), and a lot of stuff that ranges from failed experiments that are interesting but don't quite work to brilliant moments in unexpected places. There's a wild variety to these songs that you don't see coming from one singer much anymore, and by the time Cash is through with them, most of these songs sound like they could have been his from the beginning.

The fourth disc, "My Mother's Hymn Book," is possibly the most interesting thing about the box set -- an unreleased album in its own right, recorded by Cash himself (with assistance at the desk from old pal David Ferguson, who mixed it afterwards). The title is taken from the source of the songs, a battered and ancient hymn book (HEAVENLY HIGHWAY HYMNS) handed down to him from his mother. One Sunday he strolled down to a cabin on his land very reminiscent of the home in which he grew up, sat down in front of a microphone with a guitar and nothing else, and recorded approximately 25-30 songs one after another. Only 14 of those songs are here, but they're powerful ones -- songs like "I Shall Not Be Moved," "Do Lord," "When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder," "I'll Fly Away," "Let The Lower Lights Be Burning," and "I'm Bound For The Promised Land," all delivered in stark and simple fashion. This may actually be the best disc in the entire set, although I have my doubts as to how eagerly it'll be embraced by Cash's new (and younger) audience.

The fifth disc rounds up 15 of the best songs on the first four American releases, including "Delia's Gone," "The One Rose," "Thirteen," "Rusty Cage," "Hurt," and "The Man Comes Around." If you're like me and you came to the box set without having actually heard the albums in question, these tracks confirm that they're probably of high quality. Certainly all the tracks here are excellent, even unpredictable, and definitely not the sound of an artist in decline. With 14-18 songs per disc, there are approximately 80 good to brilliant songs here that most people have never even heard. And who knows what else still lurks in the vault? I suspect we'll be finding out for years to come....

Odd music from odd people... structurally they kind of share some points with Yinkolli, reviewed elsewhere in this issue (although that may be my perception because i listened to them back to back), but these guys are closer to achieving actual "songs" and they have vox and everything. They're definitely in the experimental camp, though, with a fondness for weird noises, mechanical percussion, and heavily repetitive motifs. (These are good things, naturally.) As the cassette progresses (do they have this available on CD? probably not, but it doesn't matter), the songs become more "coherent" and more oriented in the direction of repetition and drone, with occasional bursts of guitar skronk and noise, plus crazed yelping vox. Now they've moved out of the noise category and into the realm of crazed art bands. We're talking about an extremely devolved approach to "rock" here -- mainstream types (the kind of people, you know, who buy albums by the Toadies and N'Sync and Orgy or whatever) would find this extremely irritating, which is a big point in their favor. They also make extremely swell noises with efx pedals that they are inclined to loop and repeat indefinitely, which meets with DEAD ANGEL's approval. I'd go into the songs themselves but they all kind of run together. Is there a hefty Borbetomagus influence going on here? I think so. Maybe shards of leftover Last Exit too, although these gentlemen don't blast the way Laswell's former band did. The best thing i can say about this is that it's extremely mutant stuff, unpredictable and quirky, the work of a band that's less interested in traditional music than in creating emotional states through the unexpected juxtaposition of wildly disparate images (whatever the hell that means, i'm rambling now). In other words, they're weird and proud of it and while there are some moments that don't completely work for me (mostly on the second side), when they're on they're bizarrely captivating in a real different kind of way. If you're bored with the current state of music and want something a bit more challenging, this is definitely the way to go....

The title is not misleading, folks: there's some heavy repetitive mantra action going down on these four long tracks. Not that this is a bad thing. O my no. I don't know what instruments Castro is using on this release -- whatever it is, it's fed through banks of reverb and delay until it emerges as different-sounding drones, basically. This is hardcore drone music that wouldn't be out of place on the Drone label (home of the mighty Troum). A lot of this actually reminds me of Troum's more recent material, come to think of it. So the man must be doing something right.... The only real difference between the four tracks (no titles, so sorry) is in the textures of the drones and the delay speeds, but even accounting for such minimal adjustments he gets a pretty surprising amount of variety from his oscillating drone-o-tron. The high-pitched shimmering drones of the third track are particularly interesting, sounding like the singing of high-tension wires -- Alan Lamb fans take note -- and more of these sounds appear on the fourth track, where the drones 'n whines interact to form eddies and whirls. This is pretty swank stuff for drone fanatics, but the rest of the world should probably approach with caution. His brand-new CD-R arrived in my mailbox just yesterday, but i haven't even had a chance to look at it (much less hear it), so that will have to wait until the next issue....

This came out on PE a while back ago -- in fact, he may well have a newer one out -- and it took this long to get around to reviewing it because... um... well, i'm sure there's a good excuse lying around somewhere. While we figure out just what that excuse might be, let us focus on Mister Castro and his fine, reverbed 'n twinkling guitar of ambient doom.... This is one long track of Castro playing elliptical, often flamenco-like guitar figures through what sounds like a truly staggering line of efx pedals, with the result that the guitar goes through movements of tone 'n sound. On a label dominated mainly by releases full of chaos and inexplicable strangeness, this is something of an oasis in the mutant freejazz zone. Soothing and near ambient much of the time, it is driven by droning notes and repetitive guitar figures; approximately ten minutes into the piece, the drones start to dominate and take on a dark, groaning tone that gradually morphs into a brighter, denser conflagration of shimmering acoustic guitar figures. Past the twenty-minute mark things settle into a languid, nearly motionless ambient groove that goes on for quite a while, until the ambient background grows darker and thicker, with the bell-chime guitars starting to recede in favor of chittering, clattering sounds as the background drone begins to die away. Eventually the drone comes back, as do the chiming guitars, and even more eventually it all fades out, with the bell-chime guitars the last to go. At nearly 45 minutes it's a bit on the longish side (ha!), making it more suitable for background listening (unless you really like Castro's way with a guitar), but this is fine... it's certainly more worthy of background ambience that the horrible Muzak they pump into elevators. Actually, i think maybe elevator music should be replaced by PE releases, which would certainly make things more interesting, eh? [pym i

(TG and C12 are hurtling down the long main hallway of Level Two at breakneck speed, dodging bullets, whizzing ninja stars, metal spores, laser rays, and more. The entire hallway is filled with the continuous roar of machine-gun fire as TG leaps from wall to wall spraying hot screaming death at the forbidding robots. C12 is doing his part, occasionally employing his sonic cannon to shake them apart bolt by bolt.)

TG (mowing down an entire column of spiderbots): Damn! Where'd he find the budget for all these gadgets? Is there no end to them? At least the sporebots are almost gone.... (diverts her machine-gun fire to tear the last sporebot to shreds) THERE! Got him!

C12: Wonderful. Perhaps now you can take care of the million or so spiderbots crawling out of every available opening in the building, hmmm?

TG: You are so fucking tiresome. Put on the new CD.

C12 (doing so): Do you even want to know what it is?

TG: It's on Public Eyesore, so I'm sure it looks lovely and is filled with beautifully grotesque sounds. (The Power Soak Electrostun gun in her hands bucks wildly; a phalanx of spiderbots disintegrates in a thundering fireball, along with most of the vending machines.)

C12: Oh, the cleaning bills will be terrible... the accountants will weep....

TG (wisely ignoring him): Ahhh, this is all right. These guys know what they're doing. It's just one big orgy of lovely, crapped-out electronic noises that come and go in waves. Listen to those drones -- looped, flanged, soaked in reverb like a marinated roast, then layered and staggered, until the whole mess sounds like a nest of electronic cidadas hopping around in an orgone accumulator.

C12 (staring): Mein gott, that was almost... poetic.

TG: One good thing about this is that the textures are pretty varied and the entire piece is staggered in movements, so you don't get bored the way you do with a lot of full-on power electronics. I mean really, sure, your average "turn everything up and back away" noise unit just hits you in the face right off the bat and it's real intense and everything, but then it gets old in a hurry. This is a better way to go. They'll stumble onto something and fool with it for a while, porking it with their gizmos until it either turns into something else entirely or they get bored and move on to something else.

C12: I never cease to marvel that you and the Moon Unit can get something out of music like this. It sounds like bacon frying on a griddle in the backyard of the Battersea Power Plant. Is this a new-age version of what Throbbing Gristle originally had in mind?

TG: Hardly. More like if Eno had been sitting in the office of an electromagnetic resonator manufacturing plant instead of an airport when he came up with the whole concept of ambient music.

C12: You call this ambient?

TG: Well, it isn't really, but if you turn it down it can just hum and drone away in the background without too much fuss. At the same time, listening to it closely will reveal some beautiful and unearthly sounds.

C12: If that's the case, then perhaps you should try this on for size. (grins cruelly as he holds up the cryptic-looking Doppleganger CD case)

TG: Sure, let's have it. (arms jerk out forward and backwards to simultaneously vaporize attackers both front and back) Just watch my back while I'm concentrating on this....

C.C.C.C. -- COSMIC COINCIDENCE CONTROL CENTER

OK -- so this isn't a new disc. But I just found a copy after two years of searching so I'm going to gloat because it was only $9. HAHAHAHA!! Since this is the first release by these gods of noise I expected a little less than what is really there. The first two tracks (only three on the disc) are lower key, moodier noisescapes than anything else I've heard them do. (No, I'm *not* the resident CCCC expert, but I have seen them live also, and it was a lot harder than the first two tracks here.) I almost expected this to be a Lustmord album by the moodiness. Track 3 takes us right back into the place we thought they should be -- hard, looping textures that we all expect from Mayuko and Company. Everything is wonderful, noisy, godhead. Harsh feedback manipulation, varied tempos, off-key interruptions, the whole ball of wax (get the reference?!?). I can't help but gloat a little more, because this disc is now so hard to find!! If you find it, buy it, because you won't be disappointed. All noiseheads must own recordings by CCCC! All noiseheads must see CCCC whenever they can!! [bc]

CeLange -- NEW DAY COMIN' [11th Street Records]

LAWS! As i live and breathe! Somebody sent me a... a... a BLUES tape! Oooo! Not blues as in "ah'm a really old black guy with lots of wrinkles and one lung from smokin' too long which is why my voice sounds like ah swallowed a bag o' razors and all those years workin' in the auto factory fixed it so i can't hardly stand up which is why i'm sitting on this stool roaring drunk but goddamn i can play them slo-mo blooz until you cry in your beer" blues, but instead a more marginally "modern" form with a torch singer thrown in to boot. And they're even from NYC! I didn't even know they HAD blues players in NYC... i thought they were all living in one really big ancient brownstone down in New Orleans or something... shows you how much i know. (Although i can UNDERSTAND how someone would be compelled to sing the blues after living in NYC a while... i was only there three days last time i ventured up to The Big (Maggot-Filled) Apple and was cryin' in my hot-and- sour soup from day one.)

CeLange are pretty much a blues-rock band (there seem to be a lot of those in this issue, don't there? must be the winds of change or the big zeitgeist or something mysterious like that) -- a standard rhythm section (Cliff McComas is the guy who hits things, Pete Persechino is the one who makes air move) with the big groove to back up singer Sue Lange and guitarist Gary M. Celima. Lange would be right at home here in Austin with the likes of Lou Ann Barton, Ro-Tel and the Hot Tomatoes, and the like; she is a coffeehouse blues belter of fine vintage. Celima occasionally wanders a bit too into the delusions-of-Hendrix mania that seems to afflict those players who actually have talent (unlike, say me, who would be hopelessly lost even TRYING to emulate Hendrix). The rhythm section is most swell too. So is this offering, which sounds like it was recorded during a live show (even though i am fairly certain that is not true), and a good one at that.

"Doesn't Matter" sounds sort of like Stevie Ray Vaughn backed by Little Feat (only with a female singer, natch). "Spoonful" starts off with a slinky serpentine riff and moves into a sound borrowed straight from "Spirit in the Sky" and manages to sandwich in plenty o' hep grooves in between. There's plenty of spirited funk in "Save Me" as well. Of course, it would not be a blues album without a weepy blues ballad of sorts; "Change My Ways" fills that bill nicely. An interesting thing happens on "Good To You": Celima actually plays a lot less guitar than you'd expect, leaving some tasteful holes in the sound before laying into a swank solo. (It doesn't hurt that le bassist moves a lot of air on this one, either.) The instrumental "Instrumental" (duh) is most happening as well. And there are many other fine tunes on this album, making it well worth your studied investigation....

Eugene Chadbourne -- COUNTRY SONGS OF SE AUSTRALIA [Entropy Stereo]

This... is a strange record. I'll be the first to admit i know almost nothing about Eugene Chadbourne other than the fact that he used to be in Shockabilly and cut a few loopy records with Evan Johns and the H-Bombs, but whatever i was expecting, it certainly wasn't this. Turns out Eugene has a fondness for devolved country tunes about bullies, trains, and booze generously sprinkled with weird noises and all sorts of sonic clutter... and the resulting sound is sort of like an Appalachian hillbilly backed by a drunken Salvation Army band on the back of a flatbed truck running over potholes through quarry-mining country. This may be country, but i don't think my grandmother would appreciate this record!

Some titles may provide "insight" into Chadbourne's warped view of the world: "The Bully Song," "My Gas Tank Runs on Booze," "My Uncle Used to Love Me But She Died," that sort of thing. There are also several medleys, including one of train songs, and another of Willie Nelson songs. They all sound extremely... odd. Imagine the scary backwoods types from DELIVERANCE turned loose in a recording studio and there you go -- instant lurching chaos. Powerful yet disorienting, to say the least.

This was apparently released sometime earlier on vinyl (it's hard to tell, since the liner notes are largely an inspired mock-documentary fabrication), and this release includes a bunch of unreleased material in the form of EXTREMELY devolved covers of "Wipeout," "Purple Haze," "Star Spangled Banner," etc., all rendered in obliteration fashion so as to be damn near unrecognizable. I swear they are playing many creatively-tuned kazoos on "Purple Haze," and i'm not sure what to make of the rambling monologue about J. R. Ewing... these are disturbed people, mon....

Is it possible for an album to be both country and noise at the same time? I never thought i'd have the opportunity to ask that question, but there it is. Definitely not for the weak.

As usual, i'm late to the party -- Charalambides have been around for a while, doing their thing, but this is my first real exposure to them (i did see Tom Carter open by his li'l lonesome for Troum, but i'm not sure that counts). So my knowledge of them is limited, but if this is any indication, i'd say their bag is firmly in the territory of minimalism. With just two members (Tom Carter on guitar and Christina Carter on vox), their sound is not far removed from Low's experimental moments or something akin to Julee Cruse without the keyboards. Carter's guitar strums, chimes, and drones -- sometimes loudly so -- and what little percussion there is comes courtesy of him tapping or pounding on the guitar, and he drifts away in clouds of guitar tone and the occasional cluster of notes as Christina sings along in a high, droning falsetto that has more to do with meaning than actual words. It's a stark and beautiful, often haunting sound, and this is certainly an interesting place to find them -- which only proves that the ears behind the Blast are good ones. This is fucking brilliant and way beyond ultra-limited, and it comes in a nice DVD package with swell artwork, so i'd advise seeking it out while you still can.

I'm somewhat ashamed to say that prior to receiving JOY SHAPES, I'd never heard Charalimbides. I'd seen the name, but had never come across any of the music. It seems I have some catching-up to do.

Obligatory history: Charalambides has been together, in various two- and three-piece incarnations, since the early 90s. Since 1992 they've released a slew of cassettes, CDs, CD-Rs, and various pieces of vinyl for a series of labels including Stiltbreeze, Wholly Other (their own imprint), and most recently Kranky. [TMU: And don't forget the limited-as-fuck BEING AS IS on Crucial Blast.]

On JOY SHAPES, their second release for Kranky, the core duo of Christina (guitar, voice, bells) and Tom Carter (guitar, lap steel guitar, chimes, etc.) is augmented by Heather Leigh Murray on pedal steel guitar, vocals, and psaltery. (Q: What's a psaltery? A: One of these things.) Over the course of five extended improvisations the Carters and Murray conjure some of the most eerie, * haunting music you're likely to hear this side of an Angelo Badalementi score. What's most impressive is that they do it off the top of their heads, with a handful of instruments.

The first track, "Here Not Here," sets the tone for the album. A lone guitar enters playing a skeletal figure. The guitar is treated with a slight delay for maximum spookiness. Christina's voice comes in next, murmuring. A second guitar enters, sounding for all the world like it's crawling. As the song progresses, the second guitar is joined by what I'm guessing is a psaltery, while Christina's voice moves from spectral mumbling to deranged, desperate chanting. The rest of the album sticks pretty close to this blueprint, although the overall mood varies from piece to piece.

If you like your music minimal, your tempos glacial, and you think Low is too upbeat, then boy do I have a record for you. [N/A]

* My thesaurus (ROGET'S 21st CENTURY THESAURUS, in dictionary form, in case anyone is wondering) lists 17 synonyms for the word "eerie": "awesome, bizarre, crawly, creepy, fantastic, fearful, frightening, ghostly, mysterious, scary, spectral, strange, supernatural, superstitious, unearthly, uncanny, and weird." With the exception of "superstitious," they can all be applied to JOY SHAPES. "Ominous" and more than a few of its forty-odd synonyms ("clouded, dark, forbidding, gloomy, girm, haunting, minatory, sinister, suggestive, and threatening") also applies.

Charming Hostess -- EAT [Vaccination Records]

The long-awaited debut from this local Oakland, California all-female group. Imagine east European folk tunes (Hungarian, Bulgarian, Ladino,Yiddish) sung lovingly in an olde world meets acapella styled vocals way with prog rock- like instrumentation, all arranged by the group, and you'd be close. What is so amazing about this album is the diversity of material that holds together in a completely seamless way. This includesthe original compositions and even the inclusion of a rendition of a traditional African-American work song from Alabama. Further, I was struck by the deeper contrast found between the upbeat singing and mood of the music against that of the rather intense lyrics, of which in many cases are quite bleak, calling direct attention to a variety of negative social issues women are still regularly confronted with. For example,the traditional Hungarian song from Transylvania titled 'Give Him A Little Time' is about a marriage marred by miscommunications, alcoholism and rape. The liner notes add "original text includes the line 'nothing could be a greater sorrow and misery than two people who live together without love.' Discovering such lyrics is like a blow to the gut with a brick. And yet, it doesn't ruin the enjoyment of the music. Instead, it challenges one to pause and think. [yol]

Rhys Chatham -- DIE DONNERGOTTER [Homestead Records]

Okay, so this album is about a million years old (it actually came out in 1989, and of the three tracks here, two were recorded in 1986 and the other in 1981) -- i just stumbled across it and since the Band of Susans apparently worship at this guy's throne (and since i worship at the throne of the Band of Susans, natch), i'm gonna blab about it.... A little background for the uninitiated: Chatham started out as a flutist studying Sue Anne Kahn and subsequently came under the influence of composers such as Varese, Boulez, then Tony Conrad and microtonal fetishist LaMonte Young. In 1971, he started arranging shows at the Kitchen in New York, which became a haven for art-rock bizarreness of all kinds; then, in a bizarre move for an avant-garde composer, he turned toward the guitar as a compositional instrument after seeing the Ramones at CBGB's. He eventually formed the Rhys Chatham Ensemble, which at one time or another has included Glenn Branca (where do you think he got the idea to write stuff with millions of guitars at once, anyway?) and future members of Sonic Youth, Band of Susans, and Ut, amoung others.

So -- now that approximately 90% of DEAD ANGEL's readership is totally befuddled and saying "WUH? I never heard of ANY of these guys, this sounds like ART-ROCK, ooooooo nooooo, I WANT MY MOMMY!" -- we come to this album with the marvelously cryptic title (as best as i can tell, it means "the thunder of God," which would be most appropriate). The title track takes up all of Side A and includes not one guitar, or even two or three, but SIX of them. Once you get past the deliberately chattering, vaguely unfocused introduction (in which the guitars just ramble on in low-key fashion, seeming to play six different songs at once), the guitars all line up side by side and start playing melodic lines off each other, resulting in the sound of one IMMENSE guitar... panned in six directions at once. The result is like standing in a circle and hearing guitars, guitars, GUITARS no matter where you turn. Unless you've heard the Band of Susans, who work the same axis with half as many guitars, you've probably never heard anything like this. I wish i'd had the chance to see this live, mon.... (Two Susans play on this, by the way -- Robert Poss and Karen Haglof.)

"Waterloo No. 2" applies the same strategy -- unidirectional sound, minimalist composition, and heavily repeated figures -- to different instruments, in this case snare drum, trumpets, trombones, and keyboard. (Chatham himself plays one of the three trumpets.) Nowhere near as long as "Die Donnergotter" (which lasts FOREVER... which is cool by me, but most likely nightmarish for many others). "Guitar Trio" returns to the guitars (three of them this time, one in Chatham's hands), and locks three guitars and bass to a beat and forms an almighty riff that repeats over and over like a loop, going on... and on... and on... and on... and on.... And then, just for good measure, it goes on some MORE. Well, it's not quite THAT monochromatic, but close.... The variety here comes mainly from the natural harmonic overtones, which is most cool. Plus it's a REALLY GOOD riff, you know? So worship... throw used guitar picks at the feet of Rhys Chatham....

Rhys Chatham/Martin Wheeler -- NEON [NTone]

Oooo, too cool... i may have to change my pants now.... Everybody's favorite proponent of LOUD minimalism returns with Martin Wheeler (???) in tow. Wheeler lays down da funked-up machine beat and a sea of synth bleats, weird samples, and other electroschmooze, over which Chatham wields a mean trumpet run through a lot of processing gadgets. The results are... ah... [consults The Headless Sno-Cone Girl: "Am i allowed to say 'bad-ass' within the context of a review of an established composer of experimental music? No? Oh...."] ... real sharp. Stunning, even. "Charm" features a hypnotic, even danceable beat of serious proportions and some exquisitely deranged trumpet fury that, most of the time, sounds like anything and everything BUT a trumpet. "Ramatek" is a wee bit closer to "traditional" jazz, in tone at least, with the trumpet sounding more like a really zoned-out saxaphone over (in the middle part, at least) eerie synth washes and a convoluted beat. On "Hornithology" though, the heavy beat returns and the horns get even more bizarre, conjuring up scenes of night cats bopping after hours in a bar far, far in the future.... "Neon" is in more of a languid vein, opening with high-toned ambient sounds and seguing into a low, moody trumpet that has been warped out of shape. Clip-clop go the drums, "mmm mmm" go the synths, "wum da woo wah woo" goes the trumpet... hold it, ambient break... the trumpet returns... this is the sound of new jazz in the wee hours just before the sun begins to rise....

There is only one problem with this disc, actually -- it's too short! It's only about 22 minutes long, aaaieee -- and i want more! More! MORE! Perhaps the gods will favor us, and we can hope that more is on the way....

Well, it's about goddamn time, even if this is nothing more than a sampler for the forthcoming three-CD box set. Be forewarned, o my sweating li'l piglets -- given the incredibly long nature of Chatham's songs, this is a bit of a truncated sampler. With the exception of the eternally swank "Die Donnergotter" and "Guitar Cetet" (a bonus track not on the box set), all of the tracks on here are edited versions. This is somewhat annoying, especially since i've waited something like five fucking years to hear "An Angel Moves Too Fast To See," and here there's only a little over seven minutes of it. Nevertheless, it's about time someone paid tribute to the godlike Chatham by collecting up his obscure and out-of-print brilliance and putting it all in one place, remastered and everything (this version of "Die Donnergotter" totally smokes the Homestead version -- you can actually hear the bass! HEEWACK!), plus when the box set arrives it will include a 136-page book with piles o' pix and essays by the likes of Tony Conrad, Lee Ranaldo, and Chatham himself. And the full-length versions of all the tracks here and then some. And the complete, uncut premiere of "An Angel Moves Too Fast To See," performed by an orchestra of one hundred guitars. Truly i cannot begin to explicate how utterly bad-assed this is, okay? Now if they'll just hurry the fuck up and put the box set out... 33 Degrees is probably getting tired of me calling up every couple of weeks to ask if it's here yet.... Anyone who's ever puzzled over my fanaticism re: Chatham can now pick this up and hear what the fuss is about. And you should, particularly since it does cleverly have that one track that you probably can't find anywhere else. Then you too can be waiting for the box set to land and destroy the souls of a dying civilization.

It's about time this came out. Under discussion for years, this box set's release (rumored for years and finally scheduled for 2001, then 2002, then delayed numerous times) was apparently hampered by all sorts of dark financial hoodoo at Table of the Elements. Last year's release of the one-disc sampler A RHYS CHATHAM COMPENDIUM, with tantalizing fragments of songs appearing on the box set, one performed in its entirety, and one unreleased track, got everybody's attention and started the feeding frenzy. Whatever was going on behind the scenes has obviously been resolved, though, and this arrives in a beyond-swank package similar in design to the COMPENDIUM and in scope to the Tony Conrad set that came out in 1996. The ambitious packaging may explain the delay: Three individual cds (with cases and hep art, mainly treated photography by Robert Longo), a titanic and profusely illustrated 140-page booklet crammed full of essays by Tony Conrad, Lee Ranaldo, and Chatham himself, and a ridiculously explicit 96-page catalog that doubles as ToTE history primer, all housed in a sturdy and eye-catching slipcase. I'll admit the design and packaging are all very attractive (although I think printing up a a 96-page booklet-sized catalog on top of this printed excess might be a tad ridiculous for a label already having the financial jimjams), but the real meat is the three cds, containing all of Chatham's minimal pieces and spanning 1971 to 1989. All the material here has been extensively remastered for clarity and are a vast improvement over previous releases, especially in the case of "Die Donnergotter."

The first disc is taken up entirely by "Two Gongs," a long, droning piece originally composed in 1971 that lasts just over an hour -- the vast and rumbling sound of dark and shimmering waves of harmonic overtones, loud and plentiful, rising and falling and vibrating with unnerving potency. The otherworldly sound often resembles a darker and more formal Troum, using the sound (recorded live in 1989 by Phill Niblock at NYC's Experimental Intermedia) of two large Chinese gongs. Given massive amplification and the rich harmonic overtones available from such gongs, Chatham manages to erect a massive wall of sound. The harmonics, blown up to jet-engine volume, ripple and shriek with thick, buzzing overtones that vary in intensity and predictability given the force and manner in which the gong-whackers do their thing. Smooth. I'll bet this made people vibrate like tuning forks until they heaved when he did this... wish I'd been there.

The second disc is a pretty thorough collection of pieces from Chatham's NYC "rock" period (1977-1986), including "Guitar Trio" (1977), "Waterloo No. 2" (1986), "Drastic Classicism" (1982), "Massacre on MacDougal Street" (1982), and what is probably his most well-known work, "Die Donnergotter" (1986). This is pretty impressive stuff, both for its sound and its pedigree (comb the credits carefully and you'll find present and future members of Swans, Helmet, Band of Susans, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth alongside luminaries like Anton Fier (Golden Palominos), all a critical points of their own place in music history) -- long, ornate, droning exercises in minimalist one- or two-chord drone (provided at times by guitar, tuba, brass or wind instruments, etc., in varying combinations) that bulldoze you with towers of sound in hypnotizing fashion. The five tracks assembled make an excellent introductory primer to Chatham, especially given the impressive remastering job, which greatly enhances the clarity of everything on the box set.

More interesting, though, is the third disc, the previously-unreleased live recording of the 1989 composition for 100 guitars, "An Angel Moves Too Fast To See." The sound is not too far removed from the thundering drone-rock of "Die Donnergotter" and "Guitar Trio," but with 100 guitars moving in concert over a minimalist drum and bass rhythm section, it has a massive and drifting quality that expands on the sound originally offered up in the earlier works. The lengthy piece is broken up into five pieces (the first four ranging from approximately five to seven minutes each, the last part clocking in at 14:48), each exploring different facets of the possibilities of so many interlocking guitars, all of them sounding quite loud. As with the other two discs, the overall sound quality of the piece (which was recorded and mixed in several places in 1997) is excellent. I'll bet this was entertaining to see live.

You can't get much better than this in a box set. Even if you've never heard of Rhys Chatham, if you're hep to Branca, Swans, Sonic Youth, Band of Susans, NYC noise-rock, and the whole punk / new wave scene of the 70s and 80s in general, you definitely should own this. The merely curious may want to investigate the shorter (and less expensive) compendium first. Either way, everyone should hear Chatham's brilliant (and brilliantly loud) adventures in minimalism and body-shaking beat rock. This is probably the simplest place to start. Get it while you can, ToTE box sets have a way of going out of print faster than you can blink....

Cheer Accident -- THE WHY ALBUM [Complacency]

This is an enigmatic one. Hard to tell who's playing on it since the liner notes list everybody by first name only, although the "Thymme" is indeed Thymme Jones, the thump god behind recent releases by Illusion of Safety, Brise Glace, and Yona-Kit, among others. And this is pop album. Sort of. The title's play on THE WHITE ALBUM is not even remotely accidental; this all sounds very Beatlesque, assuming of course that the Beatles had been into Brise Glace and similar avant-styled bands.

Of course, this is only "pop" in the sense that the songs are reasonably short, well-crafted, the playing impeccable, etc. -- even then, they're still too weird to really get played on the radio. Cheer-Accident has an eccentric sense of humor that combines a pleasant pop style with occasional bursts of dissonance and/or bizarre changes in tempo or texture; just about the point where you become convinced that any given song could make it on commercial radio, they "blow it" with some left-field turn straight off a cliff.

They're basically having lots of fun fucking with your head; like the best inside jokes, they play it with such a straight face that you never quite manage to figure out if they're serious about this pop thing or sending it up. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle... But they're still fucking with your head. Take "Transposition," for instance... which is followed by "Transposition (same mix)"... which is in turn followed by "Transposition (same mix)." They are all the same. Yet they are all different. And no, i'm not going to explain that, either. It cannot be explained; it merely is. It is zen. Zen it is.

Or consider "You Never Bothered To Know Me," whose notes helpfully explain that "this song contains no metaphors." Uhhhh... Cage would have approved. And the anti-lyrics on "Pockets" ("What a pal! He's reinvented friendship! When the thumb's pressed down firmly, everything will be OK") lead me to suspect this is some elaborately clever lurch in the direction of dada... or surrealism... or maybe situationism... aaaah, but it still SOUNDS good, so all these things are meaningless. I'll bet you can really have a lot of fun messing with people's minds with this CD, though. And even if you don't get into the "concept," the music itself is stellar, so you could just... uh... listen to the disc....

Cheer-Accident -- NOT A FOOD [Pravda Records]

Cheer-Accident return, this time to ROCK. More or less, anyway. We'll readily grant their their ideas about "rocking" are a wee bit left of center to say, White Zombie's, but nevertheless, this is a spiffy disc. For those not in the know, Cheer-Accident is Thymme Jones (Brise-Glace, Yona-Kit, etc.) and various other arty hooligans. This is only like their fourth album in ten or twelve years -- prolific they ain't -- but it's pretty swank nonetheless. Their "return" to straight-ahead rock (well, sort of) is probably helped immensely by the fact they Steve "yes, i know i look like a stickman, now fuck off" Albini sat behind the mixing desk for this one.

"Even Has A Half-Life" makes a perfect opener -- fuzzy guitars, mid-tempo drums in a sort-of jazzy vein, majestic "introductory" kind of stuff... it just FEELS like a prelude, you know? Nothing staggering in its own right, but a good indicator of what's to come. And things get thick in a hurry... "Grow" winds and turns with snakelike guitars, horns (?), and vocals buried so deep down in the mix that you might not even notice they're even there. Things start getting flat-out brilliant, though, with the third track. First off, they get billions of bonus points for the title: "Modestly Clothed, Did She Trouble You?" I'm kicking myself for not having thought of it first. Then the song itself... Rumbling bass, a steady beat, rhythmic bursts of feedback following my thunderous riffing, then chime-guitar riffing, like a savage mole burrowing deeper into its hole, loud and weird is the way i like it and this will DO. You could dig tunnels to China with this. "Nutrition" is a more standard rockfest, but "30 Seconds of Weightlessness" brings back the mid- tempo beat and chime guitars for more swinging coolness. "King Cheezamin" is just plain weird -- strange, dislocated beat, abrupt start and stop rhythms, a mildly deranged vocal running through the whole thing, horns, other odd behavior... and then the whole thing ends with everybody shouting "WAAAAH!" as the rhythm section goes berserk, only after each new shout the guitars fade away while the vox stays the same. Eccentric, to say the least.

Hot on the heels of that one, "Grow II" fades up, only this time it's totally out of control, rockin' like a pee dog with pure blinding guitar madness... and just as it's starting to really COOK, it does something totally unexpected (what, i'll let you find out for yourself). The last thing on here is a version of "Even..." remixed by MC Shapoopy (hmmm...) that's just completely fucked up, you have to hear it to understand what I mean. It sounds like they shot it full of holes with a machine gun. These cats are CRAZY, mon... and it's a damn good thing, too....

Cheer Accident -- ENDURING THE AMERICAN DREAM [Pravda]

Even for Cheer-Accident, this is a mighty thick slab o' strangeness. A while back ago i was debating (arguing?) with the esteemed Soddy that the next obvious step in the noise sweepstakes was to begin sculpting actual songs out of noise. I forget what the upshot of our discussion was (most likely it degenerated into discussing whether or not Merzbow is still worth paying attention to these days), but apparently that day is HERE. For that concept is pretty much what's happening on this disc. The mighty Thymme Jones (Brise-Glace, Tony Conrad, Illusion of Safety, Yona-Kit, blah blah blah) and Dylan Posa (Brise-Glace, Tony Conrad, The Flying Luttenbachers, and so on) have joined forces with a small army of like-minded hooligans to sculpt a towering collage of repetitive drone, weird noises, ambient drumming, the occasional actual songlet, and more weirdness is divided into 14 parts but is essentially one long piece.

The ambition starts with the looping cyclodrone of "Vacuum," an eerie cycling hum imbedded with other, barely audible instrumentation that goes on for nearly eight minutes before yielding to "The Law of Attraction," where the dronefest recedes into the background enough to allow a solo piano piece to be heard. Weird noises and odd percussion start out in the backgorund of "A Shallow Stream" as a distorted trumpet plays, then the noises overwhelm the trumpet, then both go away together as really loud drums pound away, then all of a sudden there it is: "Dismantling the Berlin Waltz," an actually honest-to-God piano waltz with oblique lyrics about the Berlin Wall, economics, and the scary byproducts of economic progress ("the biggest mall in the world is / being built across the street from / what was the biggest mall in the world"). Meanwhile, weird piano runs abound, then there's a really peculiar percussion breakdown before the waltz resumes -- and it all ends with a lot of honking guitar squee. Whew! But it's NOT FINISHED... there's a couple of measures of what appear to be a totally different song, then the sound of a CD hanging up... for about the next minute or so. That fades out into "Failure," a piano ballad (with odd sonic effluvia hovering way in the background) that wouldn't have been out of place on THE WHY ALBUM. It goes on like this, shifting gears like mad, yet somehow holding together as a whole. Neat trick.

Actually, the noise-sculpture nightmare i expounded upon is a bit of a misnomer; it's probably more accurate to say that the album starts off noisy, then gradually gives way to "standard" (assuming you can claim that of anything Cheer-Accident does and still keep a straight face) pop tunes before the noise creeps back in again. "God's Clinic," in fact, is about the closest they come to a "conventional" song... but it segues into "A Hate Which Grows," possibly the scariest thing on here, which begins with a shrill drilling noise obscuring a piano figure in the background. As the piano dies away, the noise grows louder, until it's the sound of robot hummingbirds being shredded in a jumbo jet turbine -- play this loud enough and i promise it will permanently damage your hearing, plus give you a serious case of vertigo besides. Other stuff happens (including lyrics; see below), but it's hard to tell what it IS with all that terrifying racket going on. Eventually the noise recedes, but by that time there's an ocean of bass waves churning in slow motion -- how the fuck they managed to mix this stuff is beyond me, mon -- and then it's just the screeching noise again, as an actual song (you know, with drums and guitars and words and stuff) begins to emerge. Guitarist Dylan Posa is a god. It all gives way to Thymme and his piano as he recites the lyrics, then everything fades back in and Posa is riffing in most sinister fashion as it all fades out (for real this time). It would be amazing (well, it IS amazing), if it weren't for the fact that the complex, layered tower of construction is standard operating procedure for these guys....

Now, the fact that it took me over 200 words just to describe that one song should make it obvious that it's all too complex to go into great detail for much longer. There is no real formula to how they move from song to song for the rest of the album, or even between parts of an individual song; this is one of the most genuinely unpredictable bands EVER, okay? The most cool stuff of what ends the album is mostly on "Frozen" (nifty guitars and guitar/piano/trumpet harmonizing), "Metaphysical" (swell lyrics, more piano, forbidding noises in the background), "Exit" (they actually rock! well, sort of), and "1/30/94," with razor-wire guitar riffing and boss drumming that just gets abruptly slashed into nothingness to end it all.

Judging from the lyrics, i'd guess Cheer-Accident aren't real impressed with where the country seems to be heading (hence the title); as it happens, neither am i, so they've won me over with this cheerless move, heh. My favorite lyrics are the entirety of "A Hate Which Grows": "I scandalize history / I rape the statue of liberty / beat her about the head and face." I'm not sure whose voice they're emulating here, but it sounds pretty damn ominous, doesn't it? The rest of the lyrics are all pretty grim too -- lots of stuff about failure and murder and death and destruction and how the whole country will soon lie in ruins. My, they're a worried bunch. However, their lyrics are a lot more incisive, caustic, and intelligent than the like-minded spoo generated by countless death-metal bands. Admit it, how can you fail to impressed by lines like "the public and private sectors collide / as the corporations buy up the night / we lie under the sign and embrace / as they sell us the old dream of a new god"? You know, Killing Joke used to write stuff like this, before they decided they'd rather be heavy-metal stooges for the Alternative Nation.

I sure hope Pravda keeps sending me new discs by these guys; i have no idea where they're headed next (of course, they probably don't either), but i'd sure as hell hate to miss it....

Chicago's finest art-rock band turned out one of the most stunning albums ever a few years back with their last official full-length disc, ENDURING THE AMERICAN DREAM, an album so visionary and innovative that it will probably be regarded ten years down the road with the same reverence as the Velvet Underground's first album commands now. (I personally think it's the best and most successfully ambitious albums of the late twentieth century, myself. It's certainly in DEAD ANGEL's top five of all time.) So... what can they do for an encore?

Their dilemma is compounded by that fact that guitarist/engineer/primary cog Phil Bonnet, a swell guy in his own right, unfortunately died in February of 1999, shortly after the band finished work on TRADING BALLOONS (which was subsequently released in a private, limited edition on CD-R). In light of Phil's death and the sheer impossibility of "following" something as monumental as ENDURING THE AMERICAN DREAM, the band has made the most sensible move possible: they have sidestepped the matter completely with an album of bits and pieces recorded prior to Phil's death featuring his guitar work. Make no mistake, this is the most guitar-oriented album they've done in some time (at times it bears a remarkable resemblance in sound and construction to NOT A FOOD, their "rock" album), although it's full of unexpected and arcane structural turns -- songs begin abruptly, revolve around a central riff for a while, then either peter out into something totally unrelated or switch gears with equal abruptness. The entire album (there are only five tracks, and one is a version/reductionist snippet and/or version of the leadoff track "Graphic Depression" that lasts less than a minute) moves like a panorama of disparate pieces that, taken together, form an aggregate whole more indicative of a single shifting track rather than five actual songs. What's interesting is that the songs themselves (which, while having individual titles, actually come closer to forming movements in a much larger, album-sized single piece) come from a wide variety of sources. "Graphic Depression" was recorded at Electrical Audio in May of 1997 and mixed there two years later by Steve Albini; "Insomnia" was recorded and mixed in Thymme Jones' Chicago apartment in April of 1999; "Graphic Depression" (the short one) is a microcasette recording by Jim Drummond; "Post-Premature" is a live performance from St. Louis (10/8/98) recorded by Phil on a Wollensak that actually segues into ANOTHER live performance (Chicago, 5/31/98) recorded at the Beat Kitchen by Aadam Jacobs, and "Salad Days" is a studio piece recorded at Solid Sound on 1/31/99 by Phil (one of his last recordings) with overdubs that were recorded/mixed at Electrical Audio in April of that year with Albini's assistance.

With such a dizzying collection of sound sources, you'd expect this to sound far more chaotic than it actually does, but in fact, were you unaware of these details, you'd never know the difference. Part of this is due to Cheer-Accident's cut-up sound approach to begin with -- this wild variation in sound/structure/movement is their hallmark, one that this time in only aided by the variety in sound sources. But since the fidelity is swank through even the most "curious" of moments (the part captured on microcassette sounds much better than you'd have any right to expect given the source, for instance), the recording notes are meaningless. What's important is that they have taken all of these elements, these movements, and assembled them in such a fashion as to form a long-playing symphony of sorts. I'd like to point out that this is the most instrumental and lyricless work they've done in quite a while (although the sentiment is shared on the "unofficial" TRADING BALLOONS, which i now think may well have been a test-run for this disc, or perhaps outtakes that make it a companion release). Next to the guitars, the most prominent instruments are Jones' piano and trumpet, which are put to good use on "Insomnia" (my favorite track) and "Salad Days" (another excellent track).

The more i listen to this, the more convinced i become that maybe it's more than just a homage to Phil -- that maybe, after critical examination, this is the most logical springboard from ...DREAM. While they've tabled the concept moves for the moment and the noise has receded somewhat, otherwise many of the musical themes established on that album reappear here, only in a more "accessible" form. In that sense, they may have achieved the inexplicable -- an album that not only holds up next to a previous, brilliant one, but expands on where it left off while simulataneouly being more accessible. Amazing. What tricks will they pull out from under their collective hat next? I await the next illuminating salvo....

Everybody's favorite collection of Windy City eccentrics returns with... um... well... (much head-scratching) well, i guess you'd call it a lot... hmmmm... bizarre shit comes to mind.... Let's consult the liner notes, shall we? It sez there that this is the first installment of a proposed series of recordings made at home and in their practice space between 1995 and 1999. So what you have, then, is essentially a lot of episodes of the Cheer-Ax fucking around. Of course, since they're pretty cryptic even when they're playing it "straight," as you can imagine, when they're goofing about they are really out there. This is one of the weirdest things you'll ever hear -- tiny snippets of one lone guy noodling with a keyboard or trumpet or whatever suddenly segues into near-symphonic keyboard drone and mysterious wailing, trumpets appear, voices appear, piano comes and goes, sometimes the songs (eleven of them, technically speaking) even resemble actual songs... it's all over the map, o my trembling sweaty children. Unpredictability is the main item on the menu here. Some of them are just plain whacked-out -- "86 Career Man," essentially their delirious interpretation of doo-wop in which they chant the title over and over ad infinitum over a nifty beat and barrelhouse piano, certainly qualifies -- while others like "Aung Sang" actually could have made it onto one of the official albums (and might yet in the future, who knows). There's a lot of swell vocal harmonizing all over the place, too, which is always a good thing, plus Thymme drags out the trumpet for a fine blast or two on five songs, always a pleasure to hear. Given the time-frame involved, you also get to hear the still-missed Phil Bonnet doing his thing from time to time (whatever that thing happens to be at the moment). Fair warning, though -- there is no "theme" at work here (other than the theme of guys with strange ideas about music exercising said impulses to great abandon), and those not yet familiar with the ways of the Ax may find this extremely unnerving in its otherness. But that's okay; enduring willfully unorthodox music builds character... try it, you'll like it....

The idea here is, as the liner notes put it, to bridge the gap between their ridiculous accumulation of recorded output and the relative paucity of commercially-available listening. You can view this as a "behind-the-scenes" look at the band and their creative process if you're so inclined, or you can chalk it up to a need to keep the name alive in between "official" recordings. Either way, it's a pretty essential addition to the Cheer-Ax canon. (Then again, is there a Cheer-Ax recording that is not essential? It's a zen question, isn't it? A trick question, yes, like asking if it's possible to not like Joe Perry....) Bonus points for including lots of Jeff Libersher's incredibly fucked-up id-loathing artwork, too. Own it or be hopelessly out of touch.

Cheer-Accident/Star*Star -- split 7" [Super 800]

How strange -- the C-A side is essentially a hyperspeed nuclear-blast assault with titan-blur drumming that is occasionally (abruptly!) intercut with a tinkly piano ballad or else lumbering sheets of droning noise. It quite often sounds like three or four different songs are colliding at the same time. About midway through it sort of turns into an actual song (i think) with the chanted chorus "IN-DI-VID-U-AL-ITY," but then that too gets whisked away in favor of something else. Even for these guys, this is definitely... ah... way out in left field. The flip side sounds sort of like one of the artier Black Sabbath tunes left out in the sun to warp, at least in the beginning; eventually it revs up to pogo-speed with weird reedy circular riffing that fades out into odd noises. Eventually another fast segment fades back in, only to cut off abruptly, leading me to strongly suspect that Star*Star is really a secret alter-ego of Cheer- Accident. At any rate, it's damned strange. Dunno, maybe it's an art statement about the short attention-span of the MTV generation....

Mein gott in her himmel! Where has this band been all my life? [THS-CG: Drinking coffee in nightclubs in Toronto, you hopeless twit.] They (Julie Park and Daniel Barida, doin' it all themselves) sound like a cross between Blondie and Shonen Knife with all the extraneous parts left out -- actually, they sound like a lot of things, but that'll do for a start. In fact, they sound like nothing less than pure, perfect pop. Songs like "Kyopo" and "Get Outside" are almost a throwback to the classic era of 80s synth-pop, back when music was sometimes actually FUN instead of an endless landslide of bands wallowing in subterranean misery. (Hey, I like subterranean misery as much as the next maladjusted maggot, but a steady diet of it makes yer intestines shrivel up, boys and girls.) They sound most like Blondie on "Limelight," with the kind of reggae-gone-disco beat Blondie used to do so well and a layer of frosted guitars and string-happy synths on top. The dreamy "Nocturne" is the kind of new-wave pop ballad that used to make the radio so much fun to listen to before it became overrun with screaming yoyos bent on displaying the bottomless depths of their boring angst. "Frown" makes me realize what makes this band sound so much different than others out there right now -- everything sounds it was recorded on helium. This is godlike. I can hardly wait for the full-length album. (As a sidenote, it doesn't hurt that Julie is gorgeous and looks most stylish in thigh-high boots.)

Just to prove that artists are forever inexplicable, it appears through recent interviews that Chicklet were actually sort of disturbed by all the happy reviews they got for their previous EP. Apparently they were concerned that people would mistake them for a fluffy shiny pop band of little or no consequence. Well, there's no denying that this album is a fair shade moodier than LEMON CHANDELIERS was; the inclusion of lyrics this time around make their leanings a bit clearer (they apparently favor melancholy a lot more than you would have previously guessed). While this kind of worrying is irrelevant to me -- i though the EP was fine -- it's obvious that taking the time to make their intentions a bit clearer has resulted in more attention to detail this time around. While their basic sound isn't all that different this time out, they've taken pains to fill out the arrangement with wee but critical flourishes and have largely stayed away from the larger-than-life mixing strategies of the EP. The results, particularly on opening tracks "Superficial" and "Firecracker," are more subtle and muted songs that offer more hidden pleasures to discover on repeated listenings, rather than putting everything out at face value the first time around. Without abandoning their fine-tuned sense of melody (their main strength), they have moved in a bit more of an introspective direction without descending fully into their navels, and the results are excellent.

One of the other things that's apparently been bothering them are repeated comparisons to 4AD bands, particularly Lush; ironically , this never even occurred to me while listening to LEMON CHANDELIERS, but now that they've brought it up, the comparison does come to mind on some of the songs, particularly "Elastic" -- but i'd say it was the Lush of SPLIT rather than SPOOKY, which is a better deal as far as i'm concerned. And i don't think they need to worry about being mistaken for Lush imitators; the influence may be there, but they certainly sound far more like Chicklet than Lush. In fact, i think Daniel Barida's wall-o'-guitar moves at times are more reflective of a slowed-down Curve, especially on "White Flag." Nevertheless, the comparisons must have gnawed at them, because it takes fully six songs (when they reach "Quake") for them to relent and approximate the EP's sound, to fine effect, natch. I find it interesting that they're willing to be daring enough to mix Julie Park's voice down (in defiance of prevailing pop standards, and most of their other tunes) on "Let Me Go (My Own Way)." They also artfully demonstrate the ability to rock when they so desire on "Sleepwalking," which is not only driven by uberfuzz guitar, but boasts tremendous sizzling leads between the verses that make me want to get up from my chair and set you on fire, sir or madam. They should more more songs like this one. (They do come close with "Shark's Smile," which has the fuzzy guitars but not so much of the drive.) Which is not to say they should stop doing songs like the lovely "Afterstorm," though -- chiming glockenspiel (???), wavelike basslines, and muted guitar make for serious audio perfection. I approve. Let us hope they continue their so-far prolific pace and thus grace us with many more such discs as soon as possible.

This is the first full-length CD by Chikmountain, a band from Washington, DC who specialize in what they call "hardcore ambient sound collage." Which is to say it's tons of found sound and noises and grunting and sonic filth slathered across the tracks in collage fashion. Some tracks are more noisy than others -- "Electric Toadjuice Experiment" is a wild, chaotic brew of noises, samples, and chatter coming from all directions -- while others like "Where Am I" approach being actual songs with a distinct rhythm and movements (in this case, a shuffling "beat" and different cycles of sounds and vaguely pornographic grunting over it). "The Room" is an ominous collection of chunga-chunga rhythms at the bottom and grunting, shouting, snippets of conversation, and a sonic landslide at the top; a similar effect is at work on "Turn Up The Music (The Air Conditioner's Mocking Me)" but in a higher register and with a different bank of sounds. "Wronghole," however, actually sounds like a song -- rather than pure collage -- even though it's working in the same fashion with loops of rhythmic sound and bits 'n pieces all collaged together. It reminds me of something Distorted Pony might have done in their early stages....

They embrace ambience (sort of) on "Revelation 101," with slow, droning loops and static that form the backdrop for sampled voices -- now this sounds like something that would have been at home on one of the early Pain Teens cassettes. Ditto for "Drums," which sounds pretty much like what the title indicates -- distorted drums and overmodulated guitar scratching, pounding and crashing away like natives in the Amazon Basin wrecked on Quualudes and Ripple. By the time the final track "Use Once and Discard" makes its play like a demented marching band assembled from bass rumble, drum loops, crowd noises, and God knows what else, another point of reference occurs to me: the Evolution Control Committee. Chikmountain aren't quite as consciously (and self-referentially) "clever" as ECC, but they're definitely operating in the same territory. Case in point -- halfway through the aforementioned song, all the crashing and thrashing stops abruptly for a sample of a man saying "I was trying to listen to a record." And then the crashing and thrashing resumes. A baroque sense of humor, yes....

TG grows bored enough to begin masturbating with her extremely phallic (and extremely large) pistol. Neddal is so unnerved by this that he finds he must look away. Fortunately for him, it's time for another short review:

N/A: Waves of distortion, big dissonant chords, mellow vocals, a sense of melancholy.... This is the kind of record you put on when you want to impress nerdy-girls.

TG: Nerdy-girls? What the fuck are you talking about?

N/A: Go here and you'll see.... [n/a]

Christine 23 Onna -- SPACE AGE BATCHELOR PAD PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC [Insignif.]

Bombs explode like peaches raining from the cobalt sky as Suprajets collide into mountains while strafing all of the countryside and cutting tiny li'l rabbits into furry confetti. "Yip yip!" one screams as he dies. "Mean Mr. Air Force Maggot!" Meanwhile, back at the ranch, it was a dark and stormy night when a shot rang out! But back at the hospital, the girl with the distended earlobes wondered just when MANNIX went off the air --

No... wait... hold on. Wrong ambience. [searches for script] "ALL RIGHT, WHO RAN OFF WITH THE GODDAMN SCRIPT?" Uh oh... gonna have to wing it... uhhh... uhhhh... think topical, think topical....

TAKE TWO:

Suddenly the leader of the free world, Bill "Free My Willy" Clinton, bursts into the room holding a thick Polish salami! With Liz Glawoski holding on to the other end!

[Headless Sno-Cone Girl: "What the HELL are you BABBLING about?"]

Uhhhh... um... no. Let's try again....

TAKE THREE:

More black-suited Overmen than you can shake a stick at, all carrying lifetime subscriptions to THE WATCHTOWER, poured through the door like [insert ridiculous metaphor here, preferably involving gratuitous and unnecessary references to leather or vinyl or rubber skirts]. The lead Overman, looking suspiciously like James Wood on a bad hair day, waggled a finger at Captain 4-Track in menacing fashion. "AH-HA!" he sneered. "Ve are ze Overmen, merchants of ze napalm death love ma-zheen! Ve will dismember you and fuck your wench in the tight tranzpahrent zoot ahnd make you listen to MARIAH CAREY RECORDS! You cah-not EZCAPE! Hahahahahahahahahahaha!"

"AAIIIGH!" TASCAM-Girl shouted, gesticulating wildly to the Captain. "QUICK! Hand me the Freem Gun!"

He tossed her an item from the bag; she aimed it with no results, blinked, then bounced it off his head. "DAMMIT! This isn't the Freem Gun, you idiot -- this is my VIBRATOR! What do think I'm gonna do with that, FUCK 'em to death?"

"No, I thought perhaps you'd kill them with your snotty mouth."

[Headless Sno-Cone Girl: "My GOD, it defies LOGIC... I can't believe you are wasting everybody's time with this CRAP. Are you going to review the goddamn record OR WHAT?"]

Uhhhhh.... ummmm... [looks at watch, realizes deadline is overdue] Uh, i think we're going to save this one for the next issue....

Christine 23 Onna -- SPACE AGE BATCHELOR PAD PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC [Insignificant]

[Off in the wings, the HS-CG is berating the moonunit for his shoddy performance on this review in the previous issue. "Or should we call it NON-review?" she screams. "You winged it with a presidential dick joke! I've never been so embarassed! Well, you better not fuck it up THIS time!"

The stage manager appears. "Awright, yer on buddy."]

[Moon Unit is illuminated by a lone beam of pure white light.]

Uh... okay, um... [checks his notes] Well, i guess the joke about the Princess running from the paparazzi would be in bad taste now... um... so i guess you'll be wanting to know about Christine 23 Onna, then. [coughs violently as THS-CG prods him in the ribs with a meat fork] Yes, i'm going dammit, leave me the fuck ALONE! Anyway... uh... where was i? Oh yah, the Onna. This is actually an ongoing collaboration between Fusao Toda of the divinely godlike Angel'in Heavy Syrup and Masonna, that guy with the long hair who shrieks and makes ear-melting funny noises and hurls himself around the stage so violently that one hopes he has a good health insurance plan or something. They first surfaced on the compilation THE DARK SIDE OF THE BRAIN with "Theme of Christine" and "Space Hippie"; both of those tracks appear here as well (the first is remixed), along with five other tracks. All of the tracks are largely centered around Fusao running her guitar through a million efx boxes while Maso does puzzling and semi-noisy things with a synthesizer and sampler.

"A New Dawn in Mexico" sounds like the demented soundtrack for a low- budget Hitchock ripoff that's been tragically brutalized in the mastering process; heavily reverbed and delayed hypno-riffs are obscured by a thin layer of pink noise and other weirdness. That flows into the remixed version of "Theme of Christine," where Fusao's almost-but-not-quite acoustic fingerpicked guitar is augmented by ominous synth wails and other unidentifiable stuff. It makes me kind of sleepy (although that could be related to the late hour at which i tend to scribble off these vaguely incoherent rants). Some brutally mutant drenched-in-reverb slide guitar shows up on "New Caledonia," along with some forbidding catastrophic noises and incoherent ranting. The most interesting track on here is probably "Cherry 2000" (possibly in homage to the infamous Cherry Poptart, beloved by dirty-minded perverts on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific?), which sounds sort of like Aube gone psychadelic, if you can even imagine such a thing. Or maybe Aube colliding with Coltrane during a jam session between Amon Duul and Can. Who the hell knows? It's pretty damn intriguing, tho, in its monolithic repetitiveness....

So now comes the burning question (i know you've been lying awake for months waiting for me to answer it): is it, you know, WORTHY? Well... it's okay. While the album's not bad by any means, it's not necessarily all that brilliant either; the results of this inspired meeting of noise and psych are not quite as insistently tremendous as one might hope. It's primarily a curiosity of sorts, and probably mostly of interest to obsessive collectors of Masonna and/or Angel'in Heavy Syrup (three guesses as to which axis caused moi to pick it up, and the first two don't count). There's not enough pure noise content on here to really fulfill the appetites of your average noisehead, and the psych portion is a little undercooked. Approach carefully... if you haven't heard them before, you probably want to listen before you buy.

Incidentally, the vinyl itself is translucent pink (how cute) and marblized, and... and... * choke, splutter * has no fucking label, so you can't easily tell which side is which. Aw come on PLEEZ, will you people START PUTTING GODDAMN LABELS ON YOUR ALBUMS SO I CAN TELL WHICH SIDE IS WHICH? Gah... whoever started this trend needs to be beaten down with a pickaxe. That's almost as bad as failing to note on singles whether they should be played at 33-1/3 or 45 rpm. Dammit my life is COMPLICATED ENOUGH without having to try to figure out what the hell is playing or if it's even the right SPEED....

Chug -- KISSER (ep) (Flying Nun)

Cool cool cool fuzzypop from New Zealand, six songs and they all rock. "Oozing" is a straight-ahead chug rocker, good enough, but "Flowers" sports a really warped tremelo-riff that's both really weird and insanely catchy. Plus, who can resist lyrics like "We climbed for hours/ Looking for the fucking flowers/ And I, I, I love nature too"? Norma O'Malley sings most of the time (and plays organ and guitar), although bassist/guitarist Alf Danielson pops in to sing from time to time. "Horses" is slower, moodier, helping vary the pace a bit; "Gunnera" picks up the chug (there's that word again!) factor. The closing track, "Silver," goes on about the moon and is mondo cool itself. The whole thing is great. You can tell I like them....

I have finally put my finger on why the Japanese musicians (even transplants like these NYC women, and when you get right down to it, NYC is kind of a planet into itself, isn't it, so see, it's all the same) sound so much cooler at whatever genre they're currently plundering than their stiffy-pursuing American counterparts. It's not because they steal so liberally (hey, stupid Anglo boyz do that too), or even because they do it with so much flair (all these jagged-sounding rap-funk-metal-salsa-etc. bands have more "flair" than one can even begin to contemplate, and they're all still mostly unlistenable), or even because they steal from so many different places at once (the Mixmaster school of musical theory just doesn't seem to work as often in American hands -- the VU may be hip and all, but "European Son" is still one of the most gloriously unlistenable things ever smudged onto magnetic tape). No, it's because they're much less self-conscious about it. No American whitebread musician would try to squeeze doowop, thunderous metal drums welded to hip-hop beats, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, guitars from Mars, Funkadelic bass, yelping from a birdcage and operatic wailing, Morricone riffs, and more into a single song unless he were deliberately trying to be "arty" and "ironic"... but the Japanese in particular seem to be vested in a peculiar kind of musical innocence that a) allows them to even CONCEIVE of such monstrous creations and b) completely disregard irony or history or tradition and all that spoo in favor of the timeless credo of "if it makes you feel good baby, then let's DO IT." (Mix and match wildly disparate musical chunkets, that is.)

So this is how we arrive at Cibo Matto, then -- two young NYC ladies (well, younger than me, anyway) twisted enough to not only imagine hip-hop should be grafted onto Morricone samples and other weird junk, but tuff enough to make it actually WORK. Plus they have a tremendous obsession with food, almost as bad as my own obsession with angels and death, a deep psychotic pathological thing that borders on the obnoxious, which is of course absolutely fine by me. Since they unleashed the titanic VIVA LE WOMAN on us last year, they've found the time to record with other likeminded hipsters as Butter 08, remix a bunch o' goodies for Yoko Ono, tour, eat a lot, and tour some more. Somewhere in all of that they managed to lay down the nine tracks here, with the help of some equally deranged musicians. And no, i have no idea what the EP title means.

And oh yeah, some guy by the name o' Sean Lennon (you know, the string- diddling offspring of Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono, the one who looks more like his mama and doesn't make goofy vapid cheezpop) pops up on all but four of the tracks here. He's pretty good, by the way. So good, in fact, that i think he should give up the funk or whatever else the fuck it is he's doing (unless it involves making ugly skronking noises in his mama's band, 'cause she just be so total nuclear wastespew GO, honeychile) and join the food- lusting babes on a permanent basis. Think of it! Imagine it! SAVOR THAT NOTION... Sean Ono Lennon in a white zoot suit out to HERE with those tiny li'l round shades and a big stylin' pimp hat slouched back lookin' badass surrounded by the Dynamic Duo of Rising Sun Doom, All Hail The Emperor RIGHT FUCKING NOW Daddy-o, both of 'em dolled up in haystack hairdos and low-cut dresses and microskirts slit up to THERE and carrying tiny pearl- handled .32s like that scary chick in all those killer blaxplotation flicks while Morricone riffs morphing into "The Theme From SHAFT or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Scaring Conserative White Protestants and Embrace Lurid Fashion Styles and Be a Bad Ass Motherfucker with a Gun" play in the background and as they strut through the musical ghetto in pumped-up air Jordan stiletto heels, the restless natives chant "yo mama satan, yo mama satan, you be so fine, i digs yo Cadillac baby...."

After all, this IS a bunch of people who once wrote and performed a song called "Butterfucker." (It's on the Butter 08 album, for those of you who care. And no, i haven't heard it, but the title ALONE assures it godhead status. The song, that is. The song title. Not the album title. The song title. Are we clear on this now? Good.)

But we weren't discussing my unseemly Shaft fixation, were we? That'll have to wait for another issue, alas (finally, something new to fear). No, we were discussing SUPER RELAX, and i'm sure you thought i was never going to actually mention what's ON the damn thing after all that senseless blather, did you? HA! Fooled again! What we have here is one song from VIVA LE WOMAN ("Sugar Water"), three remixes of the same, and five new songs, some of which are deeply weird and one of which is a perversely chirpy deconstruction of The Rolling Stones' "Sing This All Together." I'm kind of dubious as to the actual need for four versions of "Sugar Water," which isn't even the strongest track on the album for Pooky's sake, but the version remixed by Mike D., Russell Simins, and some guy i never heard of is so thunderous (big, big drums that will improve your car's gas mileage by reducing the amount of time it actually spends in contact with the road) and crazed with its percussion that i'm inclined to forgive them for this. (Even though i really wanted to hear a remix of "White Pepper Ice Cream.") "Spoon" has a really swell overechoed electric piano riff and a funky beat over which they croon, wail, chant, and generally make one want to get up and wiggle one's seat warmer. "BBQ" (apparently recorded live) is the obligatory crazed-rap thing and is all right but no great shakes, and "Aguas de Marco" sounds crazily like Melanie fronting a French garage band covering the Carpenters with indecipherable lyrics, which is cool in a very surreal kind of way. The Stones cover is an acoustic bit that builds to a warped take on "We Are The World" (not as terrifying as it sounds) and the acoustic version of "Sugar Water" sounds like a spaghetti western with a slo-mo drum track. "Crumble" (not the Pain Teens song) is a lo-fi mess of farting around ("recorded at Yuka's house") that was probably unnecessary, but the "coldcut remix" of "Sugar Water" is a spare, stripped-down mix with a soaked-in-reverb wah riff replacing the by-now-sure-to-be-annoying "la la la" chorus), a smart move on their part. Overall, an exercise in extreme coolness and pimp finery. Consume with hot sauce.

Cibo Matto -- VIVA LE WOMAN [Warner Bros.]

This one took me by surprise. To begin with, i had already heard one of the singles, so i was expecting something considerably punkier; what i got instead was cut-up and restructured industrial free jazz. Eek! Yuka Honda is the sampler goddess and and Miho Hatori the singer who alternates between breathy creepiness and demented ranting, but between those two "defined" positions they basically fart around with any instrment and toy they can get their hands on, occasionally with "a little help from their friends" (and yah, that IS a veiled reference to the rumor that Sean Ono Lennon supposedly plays uncredited on the album).

Um, let's see, how to describe the undescribable... they, uh... well, it's like... um... well. Uh. I am at loss for words! A rare event! O my! Well, let's see -- the opener "apple" fades up with sampled conversation and a weird pulsing noise that builds into industrial-type drumming, weird bubbling synths, chunked-out riffs, unidentifiable scraps of sound, and Miho's unpredictable vox, but the real key here is how STRUCTURED everything is -- like a collision between the worlds of noise and free jazz cabaret, only welded to an inflexible beat so it doesn't all fly away. "Beef Jerky" (updated and re-recorded from the earlier single) is a bit closer to their original sound, funky and rap-influenced, with Miho shouting perfect lines like "who cares, i don't care, a horse's ass is better than yours!" Then "Sugar Water" does some pretty bizarre things with samples of Paul Weller and Enrico Morricone -- how's THAT for a scary culture spawn? But "White Pepper Ice Cream" is the mind-blower, opening with the muted sound of either running water or background traffic; then an unvarying beat and a hypnotic glockenspiel figure take over while Miho gets deep and mysterious on the subject of ice cream and Bonnie and Clyde (?!?!) for a while, until -- just as you have succumbed to the hypnotic rhythm -- fiery noise wakes you back up (with saxes bleating in the background) until everything reverts back to the beat and glockenspiel. Godhead.