Butthole Surfers
Hairway to Steven

THE REVIEW

Ehm... I should talk to you about the Butthole Surfers. But for such weirdos, you’d need a shrink like Sigmund Freud and not just any fool. On these virtual pages, the Texan band has been reviewed multiple times already but "Hairway to Steven" from 1988 is still untouched. So to speak, because the tracks are marked by little drawings of women with open thighs, horses urinating, syringes, and lit cigarettes, not exactly stuff for convent girls with intact hymens. It’s nothing new, something similar was done by the Cure with "Three Imaginary Boys," albeit using less censorable objects like fridges and lampshades.

Gibby Haynes and company still enjoy provoking even though they know we are quite seasoned and less impressionable by the boldly flaunted ugliness on the cover and in the grooves of the record. Their sonic anarchy (punk, electro-industrial, trance, psychedelia, noise, grunge, etc.) is nevertheless once again an absolute delight much like their multimedia shows with naked dancers, Gibby trying to set everything on fire, and background images of genital organ transplants.

Take the first track: they must have resurrected from mothballs Leigh Stephens of Blue Cheer with the lead guitar running rampant over twelve minutes of a dialogue between a cavernous voice playing at the wrong speed and that of a soured spinster. A psychedelic-noise hard rock that softens into a sound of bells and sweet chords of semi-acoustic guitars during a lysergic outing enlivened by the sounds of various animals, the birds, the rooster's crow, and the lambs. Sublime: terrifying in the first part and moving in the second.

They are the Butthole Surfers and there's no doubt (?) they're trying to rewrite in their stinky way the psychedelia of the nineties. Because only with a generous dose of acid can you fully enjoy the flamenco guitars during the bullfight of "Jonny E. Smoke": the crowd screaming from the stands and Gibby is a cross between a mad preacher and a psychobilly singer amid guitar vibratos worthy of Link Wray.

In other tracks, they seem much more "normal" (i.e.: less original). "Rocky" also pays a stylistic tribute to someone crazier than them (and therefore deserving of the utmost respect and admiration) who twenty years ago took the elevator to the 13th floor while for "I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas" they produce a suggestive drunken ballad with Gibby Haynes actually singing "clearly" for once. Again, a jazzy rockabilly ferociously declaimed by a crooner’s disaster, and then the semi-gothic litany of "Backass" which reminds me of another loony with rotten teeth who immersed himself in the public image after discharging the pistols of sex.

In the end, you ask yourself once again if the nonsorted sonic mass scraped together in the record with a mechanical shovel is just a bunch of nonsense or the proof of genius of the Texan combo. But is the answer really that important?

Among their most digestible records, and if afterwards you need it... the bathroom is always at the end on the right.