album // Locust Abortion Technician
Imagine a musical world where you can get away with
absolutely anything on the same record - funk-influenced Chili's-esque
rock, insane deeply processed non-vocals, tapes, samples, basically
whatever the hell you want. Cut it and blend it with a blast of
punk rock experimentalism and childish stabs at musicianship. Now
imagine how that must sound under the influence of a bucket-load
of drugs, and you start to understand the sound of the Butthole
Surfers on their 1987 Blast First debut Locust Abortion
Technician. This could never be considered minimalist, but the
sleeve doesn't give anything away at all - a portrait of two laughing
clowns and dressed-up performing mutt and a bloated baby on the
reverse. The song titles themselves only appear on the CD itself,
and there's no details of authors, producers - nothing at all. It
is, of course the type of off the wall lunacy that could only ever
spring up in LA, but as an attempt at forcibly deconstructing rock
and playing about in the wreckage, this is surely the stuff of legend.
At the time, the Buttholes consisted of Gibson
'Gibby' Haynes (vocals, guitar), Jeffrey 'King' Coffey
(drums), Paul Leary (guitars), Teresa Taylor (AKA
Teresa Nervosa, percussion) and Jeff Pinkus (guitars).
The album was recorded at home - according to Pinkus one of the
advantages was that 'we could take hour-long breaks to do bong hits',
and that stoner attitude colours Locust Abortion Technician.
Proceedings kick off with some serene synth chords
and the 'Daddy, what does regret mean?' passage that Orbital
lifted for 'Satan'. Like that track, 'Sweat Loaf' (a rewrite of
Black Sabbath's marijuana-friendly 'Sweet Leaf') only really starts
when the still-chilling 'SATAN! SATAN! SATAN!' loop kicks
in; except here it's a leaden, sludgy funk-rock metal groove that
is the resultant shift in style, featuring moments of silence and
some warped vocals deep within the mix. 'Graveyard' is a freeform
guitar feedback and drums affair, with distorted spoken word vocals
sounding like the chilling demands of a kidnapper slowed down in
a police forensics lab. 'Pittsburg To Lebanon' on the other hand
sounds like a fried Axl Rose duetting with a detuned mess of chugging
guitars, drums and fuzz. 'Weber' and 'Hay' are miniature guitar
experiments laced with all manner of studio treatments - cut-ups,
weird reverse effects and pure noise spasms (imagine the bits of
'Revolution # 9' that John Lennon and Yoko Ono deemed too 'far out'
leaving the cutting room under their own steam, hitching a lift
to LA but getting ground into the dirt under the wheels of a pick-up
on the way through Nevada).
'Human Cannonball' is the most straightforwardly
punk rock outing here, featuring some very solid drum machine beats,
waves of spiky guitar chords and an acid-tinged vocal not dissimilar
to that dude from The Warlocks or Hawkwind. It's a relatively
listenable track compared to the chaos available elsewhere, but
the insanity is quickly restored on the non-track of pure electricity
and hyperactive helium distorted vocals (1980s Japanese pop as conceived
by Throbbing Gristle) that is 'U.S.S.A.'; 'The O-Men' is
a full on lo-fi metal onslaught appearing to pair Slipknott with
Pinky & Perky, while lacing the whole thing with accelerating
tape noise. 'Kuntz' reaches new depths of offensiveness by mis-interpreting
a word from what could be an ethnic track as an expletive, then
playing that word repeatedly on loop at amplified volume. 'Graveyard'
(yes, two songs on the same album with the same title) is a relatively
serious grungey rock track, all posturing electric guitar loops
and sneered vocals from the Marilyn Manson school.
'22 Going On 23' closes the album with a sparse
drum beat, incredibly fuzzed-up guitar melodies and tapes of a depressed
sexual assault victim (who turned out to be a pathological liar);
it leaves you wondering who's the illest - the clearly-disturbed
22-year old on the phone-in, the Surfers for their insensitive use
of the tape, or your bad self for enjoying this so damn much. The
song closes with the sound of cows moo-ing away serenely in a field.
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