Lubricated Goat
Plays The Devil's Music

In 1987, when Lubricated Goat debuted, another star appeared in the firmament of the Australian underground rock. The eccentric multi-instrumentalist Stuart Gray, known as "Stu Spasm," was the charismatic leader of this bizarre oceanic band. Lubricated Goat joined the ranks of groups devoted to a rock that was as seemingly disheveled as it was, in truth, learned and sophisticated.

In their dazzling debut, "Plays The Devil's Music," Gray and his accomplices demonstrate their ability to blend the aesthetic of disgust typical of punk and all that followed, with a solid knowledge of traditional music, as well as avant-garde. The Lubricated Goat of this first album take inspiration from their compatriots Birthday Party and their wild, unhealthy, necrophilic new wave, but they don't stop at being mere epigones of Nick Cave's primitivism: in the second part of the album, the crazier, grotesque, and surreal soul of this combo emerges, capable of resurrecting Zappa, Residents, and Chrome in daring collages that mix irony and catastrophism.
But the first tracks have little humor: the pounding, oppressive, claustrophobic rhythm of "Jason The Unpopular" immediately plunges us into a nightmare. The track moves between Scratch Acid and Suicide, with Gray's demonic declamation giving way, in the end, to an obsessive jingling. The suspense of this beginning turns into despair in the following "Beyond The Grave," their personal "Nick The Stripper," a funeral march, dark, with a background of drops falling from a faucet in need of repair, harassed guitars and a shattering apocalyptic refrain: only the future Jesus Lizard would be able to put into music with similar effectiveness that sense of anguish and horror, so exacerbated it leaves one petrified.

"Guttersnipe," a violent cacophonic hardcore, is linked to Feedtime, with a guitar constantly defacing classic tex-mex and boogie patterns. In the voracious rhythm'n'blues of "Nerve Quake," theatricality, expressionism, and the "grand guignol" of Birthday Party and Scratch Acid reign again, but near the end, an electronic effect flows into "Anal Injury" (a name that says it all) and here begins the second part of the album, the most perversely Zappa-esque: the soundtrack of this "anal injury" is rendered through sounds of excrement, cheerfully set to a waltz rhythm and wah-wah sounds. "Hornraiser" and "Goats And The Men Who Ride Them" are two noisy swings, struggling through festive shouts, collective deliriums, strangled brass, unrecognizable timbres, and electronic disturbances.

But the pinnacle of this montage art, layering, manipulation, and sonic illusionism is probably "Frotting With Ennio," a tap dance about to turn into a march, driven by a silly tune from who knows what instrument and hovered over by desolate sighs: these Lubricated Goat hardly seem even distantly related to the tormented ones characterizing the first part of the album. Midway through, a man is heard moaning: this disorienting coexistence of tragedy and comedy places the Australian band on the same level as a contemporary group instinctively inclined to a taste for musical paradox, the Texan Butthole Surfers.

"Can't Believe We're Really Making Love" is the final mockery, a parody of Barry White and all the sunniest black music: finally, Stu Spasm emerges from the inferno and enjoys a well-deserved cocktail by the poolside.