Hotshot rock album mixers hold an interesting position in the crafting of what musicians refer to as "their art." These are guys like Andy Wallace, Jack Joseph Puig, Butch Vig, Rob Cavallo, and Chris Lord-Alge that show up on 67% of all major label releases with theoretically "powerful" guitars. Rock mythology depicts them as old white guys with spiky shocks of Feria-dyed hair, PVC pants, artificial pumpkin-skin tans, shimmering shirts with hot-rod flames, and silver knuckle-jewelry. They sit behind beige sound boards with countless dials, levels, switches, and knobs, waiting for the latest Collective Soul, Toadies, Rehab, Offspring, or Harvey Danger master tapes to pass through. And you can't help but wonder-- these men having no true interest or input in the musical accomplishment already pressed within the ones and zeros of those DATs-- if, say, Lord-Alge hears the new Butthole Surfers album and mutters to himself, "Sweet Jesus Fuck, this is awful."
Well, crack your bejeweled knuckles, Cavallo, because you have your work cut out for you. The Butthole Surfers, over their double-decade career, have proven, if little else, that perseverance, antics, and audacity count for a lot more than actual talent. They've never made a good record. Ever. You've likely heard the titles-- Hairway to Steven, Rembrant Pussyhorse, Locust Abortion Technician-- and chuckled at them. Perhaps you've seen the John Wayne Gacy cover art, or heard Dave Kendall spout "Buh'ol Saafahs" on "120 Minutes" circa 1991. Or maybe you've read about the court ruling in the case of B.H. Surfers v. Touch & Go's Corey Rusk, but you've never sat and listened to an album, have you? The albums have always been auxiliary to their feces'n'fire'n'fightin' live shows, Lollapalooza pioneering, commercial one-hit-wondering, and general personality of Gibby Haines and Paul Leary. Their best known album has no track titles and mentions scatology and farm animals repeatedly. They're Pere Ubu, Wesley Willis, the Dead Milkmen, and And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead rolled into one chaotic Texan mess. That is, they were, until "Pepper" and Disney.
Weird Revolution, the Surfers' long-delayed follow-up to Electriclarryland, was originally meant to be After the Astronaut, but it was aborted in the final hour by Capitol Records. Its pop-western artwork would later show up on a Marcy Playground album. The Buttholes now call the Disney-owned Hollywood Records their home, and like Bubble Boy, the end product can only result in corporate heads rolling at Buena Vista. Weird Revolution exists only because the Butthole Surfers have mouths to feed, mortgages, and no other option in life. This is never the beginning of an essential album.
In their increasing age and decreasing health, the Butthole Surfers no longer throw themselves around on stage, setting cymbals on fire, tearing apart sex dolls, and pissing on each other. These days, the off-record excitement has been reduced to a silly animated album cover, a CD-ROM, and Gibby Haines' ironic wearing of a Hanson t-shirt in press photos. He actually hates them! Or does he?! Irony upon irony upon irony.
So what of the album? Bedrock tracks from Astronaut were reworked, filtered and mixed to sound "of the moment." Chris Lord-Alge's lacquer and radio-prescribed hum coats the record. The thin music seems to emanate from a TV you can't turn off. Each song putters on a weak beat that jangles and blips as if they dumped the ambient sounds of a Midway arcade over some Black Grape outtakes. "Venus" and "Mexico" flirt with Eastern sounds. It's as if you took Eastern Airlines to Eastern City in the heart of the Far East with nothing but some drugs and an English-to-Eastern dictionary to get by. "God, Zeus, Allah, Buddha," Haynes says. "Bob Dylan on a motor scooter." It's about as surreal as a Lunchables commercial. The Butthole Surfers have finally become shocking only in their sheer banality, like a watered-down mix of the worst Beck and Perry Farrell material you can imagine.
Two songs stand out as premeditated "hits," in that they have verses, choruses, and the most names listed in the production credits. "The Shame of Life" lives up to its title by listing Kid Rock as a songwriter. You know this by the mention of "girls," "money," "crack," and a "loaded automatic." Calculated guitar riffs fart in the chorus like a weak John Carpenter score. It has the potential of turning up on shock-jock modern radio, where you'll have to pay strict attention to discern whether it's a new Uncle Kracker tune or a Slim Jim ad. "Dracula from Houston," the other "featured hit" (according to the sticker on the front-- Hollywood Records must be psychic!), opens with some bongos and the guitar line from "Sweet Jane." Gibby spits lazy rhymes like Anthony Kiedis before the song bursts into a massive Smash Mouth copy: "Oh no/ We gotta go /We're not gonna live forever." A fucking CG-animated donkey should be singing this. In hell.
Exhibit #19,954 in the eternal, one-sided case of commercialism and aging v. art: Weird Revolution unintentionally lives up to its title by embodying the inexplicable surge of honky fratboy Jeep-beat rock that can't disappear soon enough.
