Whitehouse
Bird Seed

A sort of midpoint between Adolf Hitler and the Marquis De Sade, William Bennett does nothing to appear likable, in fact, he goes out of his way to be unpleasant and shocking to the listener, as commanded by the industrial school of the masters Throbbing Gristle. All too often when talking about extreme music it is said to be a "punch in the stomach," but in the case of "Bird Seed," the 2003 album from the long-standing (since 1980) project Whitehouse, the metaphor is not an exaggeration.

The pair of tracks opening the album, "Why You Never Became A Dancer" and "Wriggle Like A Fucking Eel" (note the sobriety of the title...), are the most radical to have reached my ears: a deafening, frenetic, and haphazard rhythmic bombardment accompanies an orgy of ultra-abrasive and ultra-distorted synths and Bennett's crazed and malignant voice as he indulges in his delirious homilies as a priest of perversion. The lyrics, although rambling, reveal an unparalleled malice and morbidity, stunning the listener with foul, violent, and sadistic language.

Midway through the album, there's a track produced by none other than Steve Albini (?!!) consisting of a collection of testimonies from victims of incest, pedophilia, rape, and the worst crimes imaginable by the human mind in terms of sexual crime; the document is heart-wrenching but its excessive length (15 minutes) and the fact that it has nothing to do with music make it the weakest part of the work, losing interest after a couple of listens. The other three musical tracks, on the other hand, might be less ruthless than the first two, less aggressive, but not for that reason less annihilating and they are mostly characterized by a slow and heavy pace.

Interpreting this rather ambiguous work is not easy, but I'll try: in the first three tracks, it seems that Whitehouse incites a free indulgence in our sexual impulses, whatever they may be, but in the fourth track, it highlights what the terrible consequences of this freedom are, while in the final two tracks ("Cut Hands Had The Solution" and "Munkisi Munkondi"), with acrimonious sarcasm, it indicates what the solution should be in order to prevent this.

An album for strong stomachs, "Bird Seed" can only evoke revulsion given the themes it addresses, yet one cannot help but be fascinated by the personality and expressive (and excessive) force of this work, the same feeling of disgust mixed with fascination that I personally only experienced while watching Pasolini's last film.