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BUTTHOLE SURFERS  Locust Abortion Technician  CD   (Latino Bugger Veil)   14.98


The prime movers of Texan post-hardcore weirdness, the Butthole Surfers produced some of the most demented outsider punk to ever lurch out of the American underground during the 1980s. The band mashed together whacked-out live antics and notorious drug-fueled carnival-like performances with their lysergic stew of drug-addled noise rock, fucked-up psychedelic punk, pummeling aggression and bizarro songwriting; indeed, there was nothing like the Surfers back when these guys were destroying stages in the 80s. The first four full-length albums from the Butthole Surfers documented this insanity in full, and every one of 'em is recommended - nay, required - listening for fans of mutant punk; most bands are totally diminished by their fourth album, but not the Surfers; by the end of the decade, the band was producing their heaviest and most sinister stuff yet. From their earliest churnings as a wild, LSD-fueled hardcore punk outfit, their album's just kept getting more twisted and more experimental as the decade progressed, from the bizarre avant-punk of 1984's Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac through the tape-collage heavy experiments of 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, from the crushing sludge-drenched heaviness of 1987's Locust Abortion Technician to the scatological psychedelia of 1988's Hairway to Steven. Sure, their subsequent albums would become increasingly of less interest as time went on (their 1991 album Piouhgd is the last Surfers record that I give a damn about), but man, those first four albums make up some of the craziest drug-punk that ever clambered out of the American post-hardcore underground. We now have all of them back in print on vinyl for the first time in over a decade, newly re-mastered and packaged with digital downloads of the album; granted, the reissues are pretty barebones, basically just replicating the original packaging for the original releases, but it's still good to have these classic slabs of bizarro hardcore punk and psychedelic noise rock on vinyl again. We also have all of these crucial albums back in stock on CD as well...

��1987's Locust Abortion Technician was album number three from these pioneering psychedelic Texas punks, and again saw them pilfering classic rock songs and irreverently twisting their guts into bizarre new forms, smearing their music with all kinds of vocal weirdness and trippy effects and production fuckery and weird in-jokes, while offering up a bunch of new songs that are equally as crazed. Softly drifting on a bed of saccharine strings and some mighty strange spoken word weirdness, the Surfers burst into the Sabbath-parody / demented acid-punk of "Sweat Loaf", taking that iconic "Sweet Leaf" riff and looping it into infinity and twisting it into something totally fucked and brain-damaged. Once again, the band batters you with an unpredictable mess of deranged noise rock slop like the Stooges-in-a-tarpit acid-sludge meltdown of "Graveyard", and the pitch-shifted vocal slime and sludgy blues-puke of "Pittsburg To Lebanon". There's a few brief, surreal noisescapes like ""Weber", and even weirder noise rock experiments like "Hay" and "U.S.S.A", the latter featuring some supremely sludgy riffage and distorted crush that could almost pass for something from the Melvins or Stickmen With Rayguns. Locust Abortion easily featured some of their most surreal and disturbing stuff yet, but they could still belt out some pounding punk as effortlessly as ever, like on the pummeling, motorik rush of "Human Cannonball". Then there's "Kuntz", a weird remix of some obscure Thai pop song that the band transforms into something darker and more deranged. And when these guys wanted to crank up the heaviness, even when surrounded by their goofy, brain-damaged humor, the results could be punishing: there's the twisted thrash metal of "The O-Men", which gloms together rampaging metallic riffage and thunderous drumming buried in a murky haze, splattered with crazed cartoon voices and clusters of snarled tape noise and Hayes frothing at the mouth, spitting out mush-mouthed gibberish over the retardo-Motorhead slop; and the closer "22 Going On 23" is one of their heaviest tracks ever, a lumbering mass of filthy sludge rock and disturbing samples that foreshadow the lurching deformed nihilistic sludge punk of bands like Brainbombs and Upsidedown Cross. Out of all of the Butthole Surfers's 80's output, this was by far the band's heaviest and most malevolent sounding album, a demented sludge rock hallucination splattered with their trademark tape cut-ups, weirdo effects, and other experimental psychedelia. My personal fave of all of their albums.


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