Pee In My Face With Surgery dAMNATION rOAD

[Chocolate Monk; 2006]

Rating: 3/5

Styles: psychotic dustcaked noise
Others: Nautical Almanac, Falling Lights, Sick Llama

Quality control is an afterthought in some factions of the noise scene. Some bands record and release every practice, ensuring a batch of stinkers for every daisy. A good overview of an artist should be gained from listening to three albums. When one is producing an extraordinary amount of releases in short spans of time, it's hard for outsiders to separate the wheat from the crap.

Pee In My Face With Surgery is a band that I hear a lot about but am reluctant to check out. I've seen a few of their releases around, and I'm sure there are many more if I were to search. However, I've always been skeptical about checking out a new noise outfit. I make very little money, and every dollar wasted on a new CD-R could go toward booze. Luckily, my editor can waste the money for me.

When I put Pee In My Face With Surgery's new album dAMNATION rOAD in the player last week, I discovered it was a metaphor for quality control in the noise scene. The record is alternately brilliant and frustrating, exciting and utterly irredeemable.

The album begins with two psychotic vocal stylings. Indecipherable throat vocals voiced on a breath intake make these compositions frightening and disturbed. I only could hear two lines in this song: "The old lady heads this way" and "We thought we lost you long ago." Those are more than enough to derive a mentally troubling undertone. Every successful composition on the album builds on psychotic vocals and adds splatterings of ugly-beautiful electronics.

However, a few bland noise jams appear. One, a nearly five-minute meditation on a single high sine wave, is pointless and painful to the ears. The other few jams just linger on a boring drone for way too long. These not only undermine the noise unit's talent, but they also resonate with an undeniable lack of respect for the record-buying public. Buyer beware.

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