It's weird to imagine, now that everyone and their brother considers Devo and the Residents and every jackoff noise chancer in history part of "the continuum," but people were pretty hostile to Men's Recovery Project when they crawled out of the wreckage of Born Against. As their early singles landed on the desks of ungrateful reviewers for MRR or Heartattack, people scoffed and snooted. There was the stink of "art" about it, you see. So the band did the only classy thing and recorded a Regan Youth tribute 7" on Kill Rock Stars with lyrics about The New York Times and riding in boats and aeroplanes.
From this reviewer's admittedly tweaked perspective, their The Golden Triumph of Naked Hostility compilation is one of the key documents of the 1990s. (So buy that first.) A track like "Man, Urinating Laughter"-- collected here on the LOL-iciously titled The Very Best Of along with 40 other tracks-- is just what it says on the tin. There's the sound of piss hitting porcelain and some very creepy canned laughter. "The Couch" is a monologue about a living loveseat that absorbs the feelings and lives of those who sit upon it, only to expire, heartbroken. Between the cracked electronics, occasional flailing hardcore guitar, and Sam McPheeter's hectoring delivery (performing from under a trash bag or in a Revolutionary War costume), I can only imagine the audience's response when they opened for Autechre.
The work MRP and other acts on McPheeter's Vermiform label were vomiting up in the late 90s now feels very prescient in a world where Load is the new Merge (or something). "Thaw Walt" is about just that, as McPheeters imagines travelling to the underground Nazi bunker where Mr. Disney is frozen until such a time where he can take over the world. "Get Your Dick Out of My Food" confronts an interloper who doesn't understand that "it is to eat, not to saut\xDA your fucking meat." Most of the time there's not much to the songs beyond what their titles imply, as on the cave-funk of "Manhole" or their chanted titular anthem. Some of the more, um, considered tracks from their Middle Eastern "concept record" Boldies over Basra, like "In Khartoum" and "Egyptian Assassin", feel out of place divorced from their original context and surrounded by stuff like a 30-second ode to one-time bass player Joe Preston.
"Why We Are Lazy" contains their non-manifesto: because the future goes to the bovine and the slothful, of course, and it's the wheat that gets the shaft and the chaff that always rises. If this was Entertainment Weekly or I wanted to be cheap, I'd pull out tired names-that-have-become-adjectives like "Lynchian" or "Daliesque". But for all their keeeeerazy, man affectations, MRP are shot through with a pathos and humanity that too often gets glossed over. As they summarized in a track title (from the aptly titled Resist the New Way), their music was about "The Awful People in the Empty City", about trying to make sense of a wold where I'm not the crazy one, you're the crazy one. The whole damn system's out of order. Tilt. Check please.
