Label: 13th Moon Format: CD
Alien Sex Fiend were always a strange beast. A lo-fi Electro-Goth Punk band fronted by a demented Alice Cooper obsessive with a scatological sense of humour, they were a bit of a pie (probably a poo pie) in the face to the Goths’ sucky-cheeked solemnity, but still they lapped it up. Odd, yet strangely exhilarating, and quite unforgettable as a live experience, though to be experienced properly a Sex Fiend gig would by necessity mean chunks of the memory were missing, or at least very blurry. Then came a career in writing music for video games, back when nobody was taking video game music at all seriously as an art form. Nik Fiend, for all his shambolic glue’n’acid persona, is a remarkable canny operator, it would seem.
Para-Abnormal is a collection of remixes and live versions, dealing with the later stuff- there’s a stonking reworking of “Tarot” here (the “Full Tilt no. 5 mix”), which hits pretty much exactly the point at which the Goth club meets the bangin’ Techno party, without sounding like someone’s just nailed a new drumbeat to it and called it a remix. In short, it sounds exactly like waking up at about 5 am at a warehouse party that has got progressively more demented since you unwisely did that extra line of ketamine and passed out in the corner. “Evolution” is another track which benefits from the remix treatment, though here (“Back From the Dread pt 2”) it serves mainly to point out a previously unnoticed (by me, anyway) parallel between ASF and Psychic TV in their Hyperdelic phase. It’s another broken-glass-and-empty-cans-littered-dancefloor filler.
Strangely, while Para-Abnormal is a world away from the Addams Family/Cramps-with-beeping ASF of the popular imagination, it’s actually not hard to see where the two connect. In fact, it may even serve to draw people who would otherwise not have been interested into the fascinatingly idiosyncratic world of Nik and the Mrs. Okay, so some of it’s a bit Eat Static (“Information Overload”, for example), but surely that’s not a bad thing? And the Fiend vocal machine is in full effect, too, the snotty Punk singalong diatribes every bit as infectious as ever. It’s actually very hard to hear Nik singing without picturing that crazed white face bobbing around on that, well, just fucked, really, body. It’s a salutary reminder of what a fantastic music machine ASF are, rather than the novelty Goth act they’re often dismissed as.
Interestingly, nobody has succeeded in sounding anything like Sex Fiend, as far as I know. Not even a little bit. And while these mixes bring their sound a little closer to stuff you could imagine other people doing, at the same time, for the most part, it kicks ’em up the arse and straight into space.
-Deuteronemu 90210’s is Full Of Maggots-
