Megatonewelle - Mirfield Pads (2022)

This is Paul Tone, who was associated with both Smell & Quim and Swing Jugend way back in the dawn of time; and I actually had the impression that Megatonewelle was Paul in collaboration with someone else, except I can no longer find the facebook message stating the case, apparently having dreamed that part; so I've no idea, beyond that Neil Campbell contributes to Crystal Airfield, the last of the four tracks.

Well, whoever it is, it's not at all what I expected given the lad's resume. Initial impressions deposited the phrase like a cross between Tangerine Dream and Throbbing Gristle into my head, but I'm trying to get out of the habit of reviews amounting to this sounds like a cross between the Swans and Splodgenessabounds or similar because it's lazy and rarely helpful. Spacious washes of sound combined with busy sequencer invoke the sort of ethereal scale one might associate with new age efforts, but this does something slightly different, hence my subconscious having been reminded of Gristle's abrasive chug. The chug is particularly compelling on the first track, Barry N. Malzberg, named after a science-fiction author I'm not aware of having read, but who John Clute describes as powerful but gloomy, a voice in the wilderness, speaking in wisecracks, which seems to fit.

The twenty-three minute Crystal Airfield on the other hand verges on krautrock with its motorik rhythm and soaring e-bow guitar, assuming it is e-bow I'm hearing.

For all I know, we may be experiencing a glut of this sort of thing right now, but being no longer fully cognisant with what's going down with the kids on the streets, I have to say it's been a long time since I heard anything like this, specifically anything which strikes me as being like a cross between Tangerine Dream and Throbbing Gristle, although neither does it really sound entirely like an exercise in nostalgia. Mirfield Pads is dreamlike, pensive, spacious, and moving. It also sounds a little bit expensive, which makes a pleasant change from the usual.

Smell & Quim play Wolfgang Kindermann & Kommissar Hjuler (2021)

Having just looked on Discogs I have learned that this album is apparently called GURKE, which I refuse to acknowledge on the grounds that 1) I've been thinking of it as Smell & Quim play Wolfgang Kindermann & Kommissar Hjuler for the past few months, and 2) that I object to the misuse of upper case, and 3) after the bollocks I endured just trying to get myself a copy, I'll call it what I fucking well like.

'Do you want one of these?' the man asked. 'It's a fancy hand crafted edition and everything.'

'Cor! Yes please,' I spluttered and immediately sent him my money. Nothing happened for a couple of months, so I made the appropriate enquiries. It seems our guy had underestimated how much postage would be required to send the album to Texas which, as you will know, is actually on fucking Mars.

So I sent him a bit more to cover extra postage, rocket fuel, cost of atmospheric heat shielding and the like.

Nothing.

It turned out it still wasn't enough and he now felt embarrassed informing me of this. There followed another few months of my sending increasingly sarcastic messages, demands for my money back and so on in response to a series of promises that it would definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely be sent this week because his dole money had come through, and so on and so forth - somehow missing the point of my having already paid the fucking postage - and then suddenly, a mere eight months later, the record actually showed up on my doorstep.

Amazingly, it was worth the wait.

I have no real clue what's going on here beyond that Wolfgang Kindermann is an Austrian poet and Kommissar Hjuler is a German sound artist who was apparently a cop up until 2013. Musically, the record features one lengthy piece each side - electronic sound collages with loops, noise, the Teddy Bears' Picnic, and the usual underlying suggestion of something aromatically pornographic about to transpire. It's immediately recognisable as the work of Smell & Quim, which is an odd realisation given that Smell & Quim are nearly always immediately recognisable despite the dizzying sonic range they've covered over the years, alternately resembling bedfellows to the Grey Wolves, Gristle, Whitehouse, the Residents and Beefheart depending on which way the wind happens to have been blowing; and here's another one sounding as weirdly disgusting and screwy and yet as paradoxically fresh as their earliest material.

The fancy hand crafted edition I bought - when honestly the regular version would have been fine, except I'm not even sure there was a regular version - has someone's hard drive physically hot-glued to the cover, meaning it's likely to fuck up my copy of the Smiths' Hatful of Hollow should I attempt to file it away with my other albums, thus demanding I keep the bastard to one side as some sort of art object. So, factoring in the additional process of flying it through space in the first place, Smell & Quim play Wolfgang Kindermann & Kommissar Hjuler probably counts as the most awkward record I've ever bought, besides which, even the Nocturnal Emissions one which came wrapped in a nappy may as well be Strollin' with Max Bygraves. It's therefore a fucking good job that it delivers.

Smell & Quim - Nativity Colostomy (1993)

I'm still to hear anything from Smell & Quim which isn't interesting, at the very least, and I tend to shell out for reissues of things I missed first time around without having to think about it; but even so, Nativity Colostomy has surprised the fuck out of me, not least with the realisation of there being something I regard as the classic line up, specifically Milovan Srdenovic and Paul Nonnen. They're still releasing classics all the time, but there was something monumentally special about the pungent fruits of those early years, some dynamic which suffered as the line-up expanded to incorporate more and more members, none of them Paul Nonnen.

Similarly surprising to me was that I listened to this disc immediately following a compilation of early electronic works by Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry and others, and after a while I realised that I hadn't actually noticed the switch. I've often thought of Smell & Quim as the result of a Star Trek transporter accident occurring when members of Whitehouse and the Residents beam down to the same planet, but Nativity Colostomy sounds very much like a continuation of the avant garde classical of the sixties, yet without really doing anything that would have been out of place on The Jissom Killers or The English Method. The five tracks of Nativity Colostomy are all instrumental, or at least bearing no obvious resemblance to songs, and the noise is harsh, unpredictable, not always clear and, as with the work of Schaeffer and those guys, they're working with something ugly and rudimentary which hasn't been subjected to technological prettification. It actually makes Nurse with Wound sound prissy by comparison. There's some sampling, although it could be tapes and loops - it's hard to say for sure. Jagged snatches of what might be a cello repeat on the impressively appalling Drinking a Dead Woman's Piss, but the repetition is uneven and not entirely mechanical, and so - as with the very best genuinely experimental music - we're never quite sure of what the fuck we're dealing with and usually need to play it a few more times before it begins to sink in; and this one is a pleasure to hear, over and over, albeit a pleasure akin to having a really good shit after a night on the sauce.

Smell & Quim - Cuntybubbles (2020)

 
I recently discovered that Mr. Walklett attended the same fine art course as Marc Almond, back in the mists of time, and it sort of makes sense that the man who brought us Beaver Full of Spunk should once have patronised the same scholastic cafeteria as the one who brought us Sex Dwarf. Makes you wonder about Leeds a bit, or it makes me wonder at least. Maybe it's something in the water.

Anyway, just when you thought it was all done and dusted, the naughty fuckers are back, and my shelves suddenly groan beneath the weight of more Smell & Quim albums than I even knew existed this time last month, even a couple of newies. Cuntybubbles is brought to us by agency of the very wonderful and recently revived Cheeses International and illustrates, yet again, how Smell & Quim just seem to shit out one instant classic after another - arguably literally - like a musical version of the woman who keeps having babies in that Monty Python film, the one that wasn't very good; and yes, I do mean musical. Smell & Quim's strength has ever been that there was always a lot more to them than mere volume, and the romantically named Cuntybubbles is a rich sequential montage of loops, found sounds, squelches, musique concrete, alcohol abuse, scatological perversion, and Jimmy Savile. Of course, there's plenty of noise, and the sort which kills your lawn, but it's just one tool in the arsenal rather than the whole point, and this one sits as happily next to your Residents albums as that Whitehouse boxed set.

They've since released another new album even before I managed to get hold of this one, and that's great too. If you're not sure what Smell & Quim sound like or what they do, just imagine what your favourite noise group might be like if they managed to record something you were going to play more than once.

Order from Cheeses Int., a link for which can be found at the top left of the page under some stuff.

Onomatopoeia - Irrelevant (1997)

Older cervix havers and bepenised beings may recall Onomatopoeia as the musical wing of Steve Fricker's Cheeses International distribution service and occasional collaborator with Smell & Quim, notably on the formidable Fanny Batter album. I myself specifically recall Onomatopoeia from Anal Almond which I reviewed in The Sound Projector magazine about a million years ago. Apparently I may even have been the only person to review it, which is depressing.  Anal Almond was notable for combining hard, aggressive electronics with the misery of food allergies, thematically speaking, which certainly made a change from the usual stuff about Hitler. Irrelevant dates from approximately the same era but, having been initially issued as a cassette with a fairly limited run, has since been granted a second crack of the whip by means of this beautifully hand-crafted vinyl edition, just three-hundred and each one adorned with a different national flag for reasons which feel as though they make sense even if it's hard to say why.

Onomatopoeia sits loosely within that whole weirdy noise thing but can be distinguished from the herd by its reluctance to tick boxes or tread any particularly well worn path. It's not exactly power electronics, harsh noise, dark ambient, certainly nothing industrial, and to call it sound art might possibly be a bit wanky. Each of these peculiarly titled five tracks seem to comprise sounds derived from a single instrument - hunting horn, piccolo, cymbal and so on - slowed down, sped up, treated, looped, multitracked and the rest to the point of the source being abstracted more or less into oblivion - arguably excepting the bass on Chafed Cervix Coleslaw Cum Chutney Cesspit which goes all Richie Blackmore towards the end. This distortion of the source works exceptionally well, limiting what may have been distracting to yield something which manages to be alternately abrasive, meditative, and - above all - haunting. In fact, the first thing it brought to mind when I slapped the record on was Vernon Elliott's sombre incidental music for Noggin the Nog - so factor that in with a loosely Surrealist aesthetic and whatever inspired all those not quite ambient albums by Nigel Ayers, and that probably amounts to a description. Of all the weird shit I've listened to so far this year, Irrelevant has been one of the most pleasurable.

Enquire within.

Smell & Quim - Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome (1999)

It's strange that it should have taken so long for the power electronics scene to embrace the pitch changed voice as heard on Bowie's thematically ancestral Laughing Gnome and of course whatever it was that Alvin & the Chipmunks did, but it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that only Smell & Quim had the balls to step up to the bat when the time came. Unfortunately there were only fifty numbered copies in a fancy hand-crafted box - of which mine was forty-two, thanks for asking - but it's your lucky day because someone has been brave enough to unleash this monster on CD - at long fucking last.

Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome comprises an hour of Smell & Quim's characteristically batshit dada noise, opening with the eponymous gnomes telling us a little about themselves - our Pushy Gothic Gnome is from Bradford in West Yorkshire and very much enjoys the music of the Sisters of Mercy, for example. What follows may even be some sort of noise opera for all I'm able to tell, for certainly it feels as though a story is being told even if it's one which is more or less dependent on the listener's interpretation of the subsequent barrage of noise, feedback, backwards tapes, cheap and tinny rhythms, digital delay, air raid siren, howls, whistles, twanging noises, and other effects by which this work might be viewed as arguably the closest anyone from the noise planet ever came to sounding like the Residents. Then again the Residents second album was called Baby Sex and that was pretty chaotic, so maybe it's not quite such a stretch.

I've been listening to this bunch for thirty years now, and I still don't understand them, but on the other hand I just can't say enough good things about their work, of which this is a particularly fine representation.

Available from this lot.

+DOG+ - Die Robot (2019)

I've never really been in a position to find review copies dripping from my letterbox with any regularity, but it happens from time to time which, if nice in theory, is not without its problems. Of course, the obvious one is when someone you like sends you their work and it's fucking terrible, obliging you to either find something pleasant you can say about it or else stoop to well, I didn't really think I could do it justice so… The other one is when the legitimate freebie masterpiece is garnished with something by the guy who runs the label, which is why I now own one more CD by Der Blutharsch than I ever expected to own. On the other hand, there's this, which fell from the same envelope as Jenny Lives with Smell & Quim and Harsh Noise Movement, and which revealed itself to be frankly fucking amazing after just a couple of plays, which I really didn't expect. It may even be one of the best noise things I've ever heard.

Anyway, I did a bit of homework and discovered that one of this bunch, and actually the one with whom I'd been communicating on facebook, used to be in Expandobrain, one of those great lost bands who should have been enormous over whom I'd been quietly obsessing since taping Thyroid off Peel back in 1987 - not obsessing all of the time admittedly, but their legend had attained sufficient stature in my own personal mythology to at least have me yelling holy fucking shit at the screen before running into the front room to tell my wife knowing full well she wouldn't have the faintest idea what I was talking about.

Anyway, to reset to this morning, back before I realised there was a connection to anything I'd heard of, here's what's so great about this CD. As previously stated, I'm vaguely aware of the noise thing but I don't listen to a lot of it, which is probably why it's taken me so long to acclimate to the possibility of noise as anything other than just kicking your audience's head in for thirty minutes. I grew up with noise as transgressive confrontation, and only now am I beginning to appreciate that a distorted electronic racket can be at least as varied and expressive as any conventional instrument in terms of what it does - at least up to a point. I suspect we're still some way off the first noise power ballad, but, you know, it's not all an exercise in enforced bowel evacuation is what I'm trying to say here.

Die Robot seems to be, if anything, an ecologically themed concept album; or at least that's how it sounds to me. Excepting a folky acoustic guitar interlude and a location recording made in Istanbul, Die Robot mostly resembles what happens when you rummage around inside an old transistor radio with a screwdriver, sounds resembling nothing found in nature, buzz, hum, interference, distortion, grind, chug, tinnitus whistle and so on, and it's all amplified to a point bordering on, but not quite crossing over into discomfort. So it's mostly sounds your brain would filter out should they be heard in any other context, but here you're obliged to listen, and so you begin to notice effects and textures which are actually kind of absorbing, and which feel kind of good in much the same way as it does when you scratch an insect bite. Titles and half heard vocalisations hint at something, the interpretation of which may be in the ear of the beholder. Taking the term robot back to its original connotation of a creature which mindlessly repeats a task, even a stupid one, and not necessarily with mechanical overtones, Die Robot sounds like a broadside launched at human stupidity and the impulses which are presently destroying the planet; but like the very best surrealist masterpieces, this may well be nothing more than a pattern I happened to notice. The thing you should probably take from this is that for something which sounds like a power station having a fight with itself, there's a wide range of form and shade here, and a lot to be heard, even if you can't always tell what you're listening to.

Get it here.

Psychopathics from Outer Space (2000)

I'm cycling on the Tobin Trail just past Los Patios when I pass a young boy and his father. The boy looks to be about eight or nine, wears a red baseball cap, shorts, and there's something weird going on with his t-shirt. The precise detail only register a split second before I pass him. He has a cardboard sign hung around his neck by a piece of string. The sign reads I'M A LIAR in block capitals. The man I presume to be his father walks about ten feet behind, a fat shithead walrus-moustache type. What the fuck? explodes from my mouth quite loudly, but I'm already past the Walrus and his publicly shamed kid. I really want to turn back and point out that we're not living in Saudi Arabia, and that maybe the Walrus could have resolved the situation by actually talking to the kid, because I'm damn sure I'M A LIAR isn't going to make it better, and - aside from anything else - I kind of resent being made party to this mediaeval public shaming of a small boy who, let's face it, probably didn't rob a bank, commit a murder, or anything of that magnitude.

But I don't turn back, which is possibly for the best because no doubt even if I managed to say the exact right thing to aid the Walrus in understanding the full extent of his own shitheaded stupidity, it probably wouldn't help the kid; and the guy is clearly a bully so probably wouldn't be above kicking my ass.

Also, it seems peculiarly significant that I'm listening to Insane Clown Posse as I cycle, and as I pass the Walrus and his kid.

Insane Clown Posse are, for anyone who didn't know, a generally shunned rap act - at least so far as the mainstream media is concerned. They're a couple of white guys in clown paint performing novelty toilet humour raps about horror movies operating on roughly the same level as an episode of South Park. They will almost certainly never get to work with Sting, or be asked to drop guest verses on albums by Common, Lauryn Hill, or J-Live. They're not even a proper rap group because they weren't hanging in the park with Kool Herc in 1977, and their freestyles are fucking terrible, and all of their fans are white trash crackers; and white trash crackers don't count. That's most of the traditional criticisms, should you be unaware of any of them.

Personally, my only problem is that it feels like they've been treading water since The Wraith, besides which most of the criticism can be negated by simply bothering to listen to the music. They're not the greatest rappers in the world, but they're often genuinely funny, wringing every last drop of potential from what ability they have, and frankly I've heard worse; and the beats - at least when supplied by Mike Clark - were fucking great, fat and funky, as good as anything ever cooked up in a New York basement. The hypothetical crime therefore seems to be their enduring appeal to massive swarms of dispossessed white trash, so it's basically an issue of class - your traditional demonisation of anyone too poor, unsavoury, uneducated, or just plain stupid, the stratum below even those who at least look good in moody black and white photographs illustrating articles on either poverty or outsider art in culturally prestigious media.

This compilation assembles tracks from both Insane Clown Posse and their protégés, Twiztid - who occupy much the same territory albeit with a sharper, more lyrical edge. Specifically Psychopathics from Outer Space is a dubiously official bootleg assembling tracks burdened with uncleared samples and the like, but crucially this material derives mostly from a time at which both groups were at the height of their powers. What this means to you depends upon how much you enjoy axe murder gags mixed in with your fart jokes, which in turn spins upon the possibility that you may not be the target audience, and that this stuff simply may not be for you. You could probably argue that it's all terribly sexist and at least as homophobic as your average episode of South Park, but to do so would miss one important point, namely that delving below all the cartoon gore and the blow jobs, there's a surprisingly progressive morality to all this shit. The victims in these tales of comic horror are almost always bullies, shitheads, racists, rednecks, wife-beating drunkards, and other overprivileged types, and the underlying message of be ye not a fucking douche is delivered without a hint of sermonising, and most significantly it's delivered to massive swarms of dispossessed white trash, the people arguably most vulnerable to exploitation by forces with vested interests in their acting like bullies, shitheads, racists, rednecks, and wife-beating drunkards.

Anyway, on top of that, the disc rocks like nobody's business, and we even get Ice-T on one track. $50 Bucks alone might be worth the cover price - a peculiar combination of wistful country rock and fat-ass swagger that renders all those other shitty rap-rock crossover acts completely redundant; and then there's Twiztid's She Ain't Afraid which must easily rank amongst the most raucously pornographic tracks ever laid down, sort of like Smell & Quim without having to stick your fingers either in your ears or down your throat; and all with the sneer and frisson of a funky Sex Pistols. Of all the bands you need at your side when you've had a shitty day, there's something really cathartic about this bunch, which is probably aided by the music offering more than just straight nihilism.

So some of this was in my thoughts as I cycled past the Walrus, because the world needs less of his kind; and because - to paraphrase some conservative sociopath or other - either raise your kids the right way, or the music they listen to will end up raising them for you, although in the case of Insane Clown Posse and Twiztid, that may not be such a terrible thing after all.

Smell & Quim - Your Enemy's Balls (1994)

My friend Andy described Smell & Quim as the industrial Chas & Dave. I very much like the idea of Smell & Quim as the industrial Chas & Dave but I suspect Andy was confusing thematic tangents with the presence of an ampersand in the name of the band. We've all done it.

Maybe they're more like Second Annual Report dubbed onto VHS footage of the Kenny Everett Video Show; or maybe I'm just wasting everyone's time with such comparisons.

For the sake of argument let's agree that Smell & Quim were what happened when power electronics developed a long overdue sense of humour, given that The English Method predated William Bennett's transformation into a sort of sadist Bruce Forsyth by two years; or at least let's agree that I've just written that. Ignoring the notion that there was ever anything genuinely tittersome about Porridge wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Charles Manson's todger - the joke being that no-one knows it's Charles Manson's todger tee hee playful yet subversive blah blah blah  - I suppose it was inevitable given the inherent absurdity of a man stomping around a stage screaming about how he's going to do you up the wrong 'un.

The thing is that with a lot of these noisy types, especially those from the pornier end of the spectrum, whilst grimacing like you actually mean it may well render the work all the more terrifying, it all begins to look a bit art gallery after a while, particularly since the mainstream Turner Prize winning art world went all Moors murderers and elephant poo. With this in mind, Smell & Quim came across as altogether more visceral when I first heard them and was still in the throes of my initial what the fuck? reaction - a thoroughly disgusting journey into the actual tastes and smells, the cheesy and the yeasty of their routinely appalling subject matter in contrast to the sanitised airbrushed pubes of their contemporaries; and never mind all this posing around as some faceless authoritarian organisation with a scary name, Smell & Quim always knew they were a pop band. They even dressed as Elvis a couple of times. That's ennatainment!

I always thought Your Enemy's Balls was supposed to be some kind of greatest hits given that the excellent Bukowski-sampling Shaft of a Goad / Lurve was on The English Method, but I could be wrong. In any case, it's a thoroughly convincing place to start with this lot, should you feel so inclined and seeing as they're still cheap over on Discogs; and Turned Over to Sod in particular demonstrates why they are the one noise band you simply must have in your collection, as Tony Blackburn might put it - twenty-two minutes of looped noise with the horrifying vocal performed by a speak and spell machine. You may well think what the hell is this shit?, but the effect is peculiar once it draws to an end, as though you're left beached on a slightly different and certainly weirder universe than when you first hit play. So even if you really must regard Smell & Quim as a comedy turn - the sort of thing which makes the Residents sound like a lounge act covering the Steve Miller Band - there is nevertheless a solemn and unsettling power to what they do; and in terms of what you get for your noise dollar, they really do make most of the competition sound like po-faced wankers. Your Enemy's Balls also includes a track called Incontinence Pants Are Go, if that helps.

Ceramic Hobs - Oz Oz Alice (2010)

Remember that slightly troubled kid at school whose parents forbade him to listen to records by anyone other than the Swans and Splodgenessabounds? Well...

No. No. No.

Let's start again...

So you've just purchased a brand new shit-throwing machine. You've followed the instructions, duly bolted down all the gaskets, and now you're out in the yard ready to give it a whirl. You throw the toggle and stand in admiration as a controlled storm of stinking effluence arcs across the path, and then fuck—

In a panic you remember too late where you left all the groups last night, and now they're covered in it! The Birthday Party, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Pink Floyd, Electric Light Orchestra - all dripping in reeking human poo! It's a disaster! You rush them into the kitchen, bundling them all into the sink and begin scrubbing away with a brillo pad, trying to console yourself with the thought that at least no-one will be able to tell with ELO. The dog comes in, brushes against your leg and you fall, for some reason, reaching out to steady yourself and accidentally hitting the control for the waste disposal. There's a disgusting gurgle as all the bands are sucked down the plughole - even though that isn't actually how a waste disposal works - and you know it's too late. You go outside for a smoke, then come back in and disconnect the waste disposal from the power supply, then set to work on clearing out the fetid gunk of what used to be the Birthday Party, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Pink Floyd, and the Electric Light Orchestra. You hold a gobbet to your nose and sniff, and if you're anything like me, which you probably aren't, it reminds you a bit of Oz Oz Alice; which is at least preferable to sounds like The Fall, as frequently opined by morons in reference to anything which, bearing no comparison to U2, must therefore logically constitute a Mark E. Smith rip off.

Bollocks.

The mad have by some definition become the last minority upon whom it's still apparently okay to perform dubious medical experiments; and for the sake of clarity here, by mad I mean those of the United Kingdom who have had occasion to be sectioned under the mental health act, as opposed to folks who might wear a Marilyn Manson T-shirt and regard themselves as a bit edgy. Mad - a term reclaimed by the Mad Pride movement - describes those who may suffer from a variety of mental conditions to greater or lesser degrees, and is no more useful as a blanket description of a particular type of person than any other impersonal collective noun - black, white, gay or whatever. Being mad does not necessarily determine one's level of intelligence, sexual preference, creativity, employability, or how useful a person is likely to be in the wider context of society. Nevertheless the mad are the one group to whom an entirely different set of laws are routinely applied in contrast with the rest of us. Things can be done to the mad without requiring the consent of the individual, and any movement in opposition to this finds itself additionally in opposition to not only the legal system, but in some cases - so it has been argued - to the interests of both psychiatric and pharmaceutical professions.

Ceramic Hobs, a band comprising some who have themselves had dealings with representatives of the mental health profession, are amongst the more conspicuous of the Mad Pride bands, at least from where I'm stood; and perhaps unsurprisingly their music really gets in there, representing a uniquely fractured vision of much greater honesty and intensity than the usual Radiohead feeling a bit sad because they don't like working in an office type of deal. From certain angles, it's the more terrifying end of psychedelic garage - the kind with cartoons of evil mushrooms growing from murderous looking band members on the record cover - filtered through Smell & Quim or one of the more unpleasantly odiferous noise groups, and it rocks. It may initially sound like a wall of noise, or at least one of those jam sessions where everyone gets pissed off and the guitarist suddenly starts playing Pictures of Matchstick Men by Status Quo because he's bored - which does actually happen here on Toto In Africa - but the more you listen to Oz Oz Alice, the more sense it makes, or at least the more it takes shape; and by the third or fourth spin, every last distorted crackle and rustle of mangled master tape sounds like art, and good art, as in something that's been put there for a reason.

It's harrowing and bonkers of course, but nevertheless absorbing for representing such a raw and genuine vision, something that is clearly enjoying itself and doesn't give a shit as to the listener getting it in quite the same way as all those Oasis fans identifying with their idols. Also, it's funny and even somehow educational - funny not least during the deathly serious delivery of the when I'm pooing on your head section of the title track, amongst other things; and educational because sometimes it's a good fucking thing to get yourself some insight into how other people think, particularly when they think in ways quite different to whatever you're used to.

Oz Oz Alice is a mess but it's also quite brilliant; and it's the exact opposite of U2, Radiohead, and anything you will ever see on The X-Factor.