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Rating: 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.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
03 I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas (04:56)
Ten foot tall and the nurse stuck a needle in my arm
Well Uncle Doc's nurse use a needle with ungodly charm
Walkin' down the hall the dentist LOOMED through the door
I Saw an X-Ray of a girl passing gas
The one shot theory got a query things got rolling at last
Hey, HEY hey daddy, why die in the war
Jesus Hitler Buddha Santa Mary Klaus Barbie (Rice Bore?)
Well Ben got arrested and the sky was the ocean that day
Words got twisted and history didn't know what to say
God dog sex death life and now I'm feeling old
These images were conjured up by talking on the telephone
I Saw an X-Ray of a girl passing gas
Oh my God it seems like just the other day
But it might have been one hundred years before
And I know there is no other way
We only have to wonder what it's for
04 John E. Smoke (06:40)
This here a song, is about John W Smoke Junior
It's about bein' in love and lovin' the love that's hatin' the love
the love and the love and the hate that's lovin with all
It's around the love that's hate that's the hate that's the love
And the love is the love that is the hate that's hatin' the love,
it's lovin' the hate
It's about John W Smoke's mom, it's with his mom
it's about his mom it's about his mom it's about lovin his mom
and bein' without his mom and lovin' the hate that's hatin' the love
and his mom and all the time they're there
Hatin' the hate that's lovin' the hate it's love it's the love that's hate
And it goes somethin' about like this
John E Smoke, oh John E Smoke
John Smoke, oh John E Smoke
Whaoh John E Smoke, John E John E John E John
John, John Smoke
John E Smoke
Here we go
John, John was a little crippled midget lesbian boy
but stood ten foot tall with a knife
Pretty soon the mole had appeared on John's left leg
and real black it extended out 469 different miles
and veirly veirly it was 69 different nuns
speaking simotainesouly to John in 69 different languages
And then it evolved itself and it was the legless dog that became
a cycle in John's fater's fore head
And there is was like a twinkie with a haylo storm in it
and it revolved down into the sky and talked to John
like he was a little puppy himself
And John said that I am not the magma, I am not the crust
and I shall evolve when the rain had come down here and was hed on John
And he said that I will be a cigerrate butt before it's all done with
And they said no, you are the flame itself and you shall burn pure
in the South American sky where the blooddogs worship the stairway
John E Smoke, oh John E Smoke
oh John Smoke, ooo OW!
John E Smoke, oh John E Smoke
oh oh John E Smoke
oh John E John E John E John E John E John E John E John E John E
John E John E Jooooooooooooooooo
And so brainlessly leglessly hairlessly the foil tip top of itself,
and revealed to John that the kiawe twe laxury liner extended out of John's left side
And so it had preach you in Mars with a saram backwards
and up waralve they did evole
Downward they fell like a thin sheet of waste plaunt it with would come over John's body
His body was no longer the tribe vehicle express itself
And he could be the dog and the dog's eyes which had blood comin' out like they were
roped around John's leg and pulled him up, like he was a canoe and and he flew
on the live peasents himself, the South American where he was in mathe
05 Rocky (03:45)
Well all of my friends, baby
They're going insane, now
Look up at my fingers, baby
Get lost in the rain
Halfway off the g-round
Jumping oughta down
Afraid to hear the sound
Of all that's going down
Na na na na baby
Hey Hey Hey Hey
Dear Baby Jesus
Here are my shoes
They don't smell so hot
But they've never read the news
Well all of my friends, baby
They thought I'm insane, now
Look up at my fingers, darlin
Get lost in the rain
Walking through a haze
Of shattered memories
They're flying through the trees
Their roots are at my knees
Na na na na baby
Hey Hey Hey Heeeeeeeeey
Afraid to hear the sound
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