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...

1984's Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac was the first full-length album from the Surfers, originally released on the iconic indie label Touch And Go; where their previous EPs churned with the band's early lysergic hardcore thrashing, here the Butthole Surfers began to move in a much more psychedelic direction. Using off the wall tape editing experiments, bizarre electronic effects and the extreme emetic vocalizations of frontman Gibby Haynes, this was a band that was obviously working hard to expand beyond the parameters of punk rock. Opening the album with the drooling, gibbering insanity of "Concubine", Haynes starts to spit up a litany of weird ravings over the roiling, rocking punk rock dirge. "Eye Of The Chicken" is a hallucinatory blast of acid punk weirdness that combines bursts of wiry hardcore with a bizarre stop-start structure that slips from punk into fucked-up vocoder-like moaning. Then there's "Dum Dum", which starts off sounding like some darkened, murky krautrock workout, the drums pounding out a hypnotic, rolling backbeat that's lifted wholesale from Black Sabbath's "Children Of The Grave", as sheets of guitar noise and feedback wash over the band, the bass locked into a simple sinister riff, Haynes delivering his lines in a rapid patter throughout the song. And "Woly Boly" is weird, almost Cramps-style psychobilly boogie, bizarre twangy guitar carnage splattered across the band's mutant cowpunk. "Negro Observer" is one of their more melodic noise rock songs, featuring some pretty-yet-dissonant guitar jangle and gobs of wheezing, tuneless saxophone blurt, followed by the ripping hardcore anthem "Butthole Surfers", one of the most ferocious songs on Psychic..., a throwback to the sort of atonal speed-fueled delirium found on their debut EP. Of course, more weirdness abounds: the fucked-up brain-damaged scum-blues dirge "Lady Sniff", the ominous surf-rock flecked punk of "Mexican Caravan", "Gary Floyd"'s country-fried delirium. One of the longest songs on the album, "Cherub" is another one of those oddly krautrocky songs, more of that hypnotic rhythmic lurch and loop layered beneath bursts of crazy effects and Haynes's nutzoid whoops and howls, the guitar tuned in to almost theremin-like transmissions of ghostly sound. Definitely one of my favorite Surfers albums, and an all-time classic in the canon of surrealistic psych-punk.