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More a concept band than a musically ambitious one, Butthole Surfers spent their formative -- and more interesting -- years of their illustrious career as a nail in the side of the moral majority with trashy noise, threatening song titles ("The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey Oswald's Grave"), and album titles like Rembrandt Pussyhorse. Singer Gibby Haynes made warped, distorted vocal insanity with the help of his own "gibbytronix" effects. Every utterance swooped down like the devil's preacher to ramble over super noisy, sometimes driving, Industrial and Punk-flavored gutter psychedelia. To hear them is to open a Pandora's box of dark, bending guitar melodies, twisted, scary sounding voices ("Moving to Florida"), Hardcore boom-tat, deranged Surf beats, and Lo-Fi Industrial thunder. Hardly a threat to anything other than one's funnybone, many longtime fans felt Butthole Surfers crossed enemy lines (and destroyed their freedom to operate outside of the mainstream) with their 1992 signing to Capitol and even worse, their 1996 modest radio hit "Pepper" from Electric Larryland. |
