Label: Cherry Red Format: 2CD
Okay! Hands up everyone. Gimme your Alien Sex Fiend Moment (if you don’t have one, go out and buy this album and wait until something funny happens. May spoil the whole point of the review, but quite frankly, who gives one?). Mine? Here we go. Off me tits, so to speak, watching Sex Fiend at The University of London Union, oooh, a fuck of a long time ago, and some guy, real scary-lookin’, comes up to me having spent several minutes making the approach (so there’s me, off my tits as I may have mentioned, going “Who the fuck’s this guy stalking towards me?”) And I shit you not, visions of mad knifemen, people with guns and even little midgets from the end of Don’t Look Now danced before my, I must add, off-me-tits eyes) and says, cagey like: “Is it just me, or was there a giant rat onstage just now?”
Had he not been so ugly (and dare I say it, so fucking weird) I would have hugged him there and then and – oh, hold on a minute, I’ve got someone on the other line… Shit, yes, the review! God, how nostalgia makes you forget! That and cider. But where were we? Oh yes, Fiend At The Controls. This album is in fact the reason for old Uncle 90210 to come over all nostalgic at ya – let’s be honest here, it’s been a long time since I listened to ASF, and this, being an album of deleted B-sides, mixes and demos, had not only a whole shitload of stuff (and yes, check it with the OED if you don’t believe me, “shitload” is the approved group noun for stuff) that I’d never heard before, such as the Inferno soundtrack, ‘cos, being practically the Unabomber, I don’t really know video games that well, and loads more versions of stuff I used to love and just haven’t heard for ages – “Dead And Buried,” “Manic Depression (Dub Mix)” – and at times like that, you just have to sit back and say “Fuck Yeah!”
So far, so unintelligible. But what (they cry, they scream, and someone has even just tried to carve on my forehead in desperation), the fuck does it sound like? Speaking minimalistically, an Electro rhythm section, some guitar and a bloke shouting. But that ain’t no kind of review, is it now? Let’s talk psychedelic experiences. The Orb, say, now that’s good music for good acid trips. Yes? Good, I’m glad you’re with me. Coil? That’s spooky ones. Sex Fiend have always dealt more with the “Christ, who the fuck am I? Shit, I have to go and buy some fags and milk” end of things – or that’s what I get from them anyway. Always too much fun to be a “proper” Goth band, yet too dark to be a joke; too Rock ‘n’Roll (in an Alice Cooper stylee) to be a Punk band; too Electro to be Black Sabbath, but too good to be Gary Numan.
There are some bands who think (the fools!) that Elvis is dead, some who think that He’s alive; Alien Sex Fiend, on the basis of their recorded output, are fervent believers in the fact that if he did die, and then came back to life, he’d be rockin’ more than ever. Oh, and there was a giant rat onstage. Like I say, it’s a Moment.
-Deuteronemu v.90210.1-
