I'll be straight, the cacophonous noise-punk jamming that the Los Angeles-based collective Gang Wizard sink their teeth into on Byzantine Headache isn't for everybody. The first song, "Another Misplayed Endgame", is an entrancing, formless jam with soft percussion and splattery drums, lo-fi ambience, wordless vocals, and spare melodic instrumentation that makes for one of their more "accessible" tracks. From there, though, the California free/punk garage orchestra stumble and lurch through a trippy improvised warzone of noisy, skronky punk-skuzz, fucked-up keyboard noise, crude feedback-splattered hardcore assaults, broken noise rock, retarded death metal vocals, coked-up cartoon character shrieks, random percussive clatter, broken and malfunctioning instruments, inept Krautorkc jams, strained melodies and bodies hurtling through the air. The troupe freak out in a junkyard feast of brutal, slobbering vomit mess across the ten tracks of Byzantine Headache, channeling the silly garage slop of primo Bunnybrains, Dead C, Beefheart, the primitive '60s ramblings of the Godz, and the early 90's free-noise-rock moves of bands like Sun City Girls and Boredoms and achieving absurd levels of randomness. If your looking for linear rock sounds, move on please; this is fucked up, damaged noise rock skronk at it's loosest. This is the band's first release for Load after putting out three LPs on Ecstatic Peace (as well as seemingly hundreds of CD-rs, 7"s, and tapes throughout the fringes of the sub-underground), and has one of the funniest album covers of the year: biting the design style off of the classic Crass/Gee Vaucher covers, but with a MAD Magazine take on one of the more reknowned photos from the Vietnam War.