Label: Mego Format: CD
There’s something ominous afoot in Vienna. What seems to have happened is that a band who might at one point have enjoyed metallic doom-merchandising have discovered the joys of mincing music through a sampler, hardcore digital style. The result is The Male Comedy, a record which takes liberties beyond the mere juxtaposition of disparate elements of rock music, but proceeds to shaft them royally, again and again and again. The suspicion is that even before the editing tools were plugged in, the music Fuckhead produce would have been pretty chaotic, anarchic, even unlistenable to most ears.
Delighting in producing a stream of aural filth with superficial resemblances to the normal modes of musical expression – guitars, drums, bass, effects – even taking the the worst excesses of General MIDI synth-guitar compositions beyond the industrial grind of Godflesh into outrageous aural assaults like “The Colossal Irritator”. The band (there are six of them at work here) hack bloody chunks from macho musical expression with the finesse of romper-stomping post-Situationist author Stewart Home‘s appropriation of the method and content of Seventies skinhead pulp fictions. Like Home, there’s a nagging feeling that Fuckhead are enjoying the chance to spout the greatest excesses of the anti-intellectual, aggressive male point of view just a little too much, but what other form is catharsis going to take?
Whether gleefully battering the drum solos of “Doin’ Business” and “And The Ego Flows” into a left-right channel split of noise versus grind and splatter, doing mischief through the surface noise and ranting theatrics of “The Brainpan Cauterizer” or turning over the entrails of “The New Rapids In Conversation” until the electronics squeal and churn nauseously, this band want to live up to their name to the greatest degree possible in a manner which reveals an unsurprising affinity with Einstürzende Neubauten. Where Laibach use Machiavellian subtlety (or at least ironic bombast) in their brutalist deconstruction of the rock monster, and post-rockers like Trans Am mix and match in an ultimately reverential, even progressive, manner, Fuckhead seem more interested in nihilism, in stopping rock dead through over-exertion. Obviously, they haven’t got a hope in Hell on their own, but as a journey through the sixteen digital circles on the CD shows, they’re definitely up for the struggle. Awesome.
-Antron S. Meister-
