The Rub
Bikini Gospel

1987, Happy Squid label from Pasadena, therefore California, and the Rub located between Torrance and San Pedro (there's even a map drawn on the inner insert): Tim Baker on drums, Dan Duarte guitar and vocals, Eddie Mooney on bass and additional vocals, they weave this dynamite "crime" by laying down this Lp on the road from the ocean to Mojave, into the desert.

Here we need to understand once and for all that there are two categories of human beings: those who compete, who "play" at various levels of possession, practically those employed by deceit, and those who have reached such a point of soul evolution that they no longer play, they simply don't give a damn about anything and to pass the time of yet another reincarnation that grinds our gears, given the manifest divine superiority, they amuse themselves in their inner light wasting time, maybe I don't know, strumming chaos.

And the further one advances in enlightenment, the more one chooses a "shabby" path in diluting the bearing of the light that accompanies us. In this case, in contrast to the cover which conveys a "no future" message with that mushroom cloud, the gore heads of an alien Easter and the plasticized beauty of our ego semi-buried by radioactive sand under the guise of a Barbie, they contrast the back cover with the mockery of a millennial game presenting itself in the form of garage punk rock played as God commands, played daDDio: grinning smile, sparkling streamers, and presence of a white dove indicating the right path of music for outcasts, pure rockers, those who have left behind judgments and considerations and wallow in the mud like Cleopatra used to bathe in milk.

The record is an apotheosis, a first listen does not fully grasp what these dissimulators are up to below deck. Go listen carefully to those bass lines, and realize all those variations of the drum on the basic rhythm, and try to keep up with the sudden changes of the guitar with attached fluid solos, and voices and lyrics that disenchantedly denounce the foolishness that surrounds us. Blasts of transcendent irony passing from a sort of evolved punk, given the compositional evolutions.

And the beauty is that no one is spared, especially not themselves, in the cauldron that slowly cooks everyone but rejects with a rasberry the massacre game of the American meat grinder. Bon appétit!