The USA Is a Monster are, in their poetic way, patriots. Caught between hippie repose and punk venom, the band's political vision lends their music its "so anti-American, it's American" attitude. Loyal fans already know, from their records and their shamanic artwork, that their unforgiving posture toward history lines up best with Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the early chapters of Howard Zinn's People's History, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, and those "Original Homeland Security" T-shirts with the rifle-toting Indians. On Space Programs, their fourth album, they take another glance at our republic's origin myths through a glass darkly.
Blown out with antic energy, the record peels forward with "Cocaine Wedding". Celebrity mavens may link the title to the chemically enhanced matrimony of Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli; certainly the song's sound and structure, abruptly upshifting and downshifting out of its muscle-car rhythms, trace the manic arc of doomed love. But, in the end, the USA is always the subject with the USA Is a Monster, so maybe moral rot and the cult of celebrity are the true issues, and all the song's hints of a circus atmosphere, thanks to Johnny Mateo's fiery trombone, are jabs at the era of Britney.
"Ice Bridge" immediately flings us back into the usual TUSAIAM territory, telling a searing tale about man's lust for the unknown, beginning calmly, then taking their trademark singsong vocals about Norsemen and Cheyenne medicine men over a rocky landscape of monumental riffs and rhythms. Out of drifting time signatures and drawn-out harmonies, they carve a sense of aimless, star-crossed wandering. Whether Americans, Europeans, or the so-called natives are the wanderers, it isn't always easy to tell. While that virginal past occupies much of their time, ominous signs of the future are everywhere. On the laser-synthed "Frozen Rainbows" and the frenzied early bars of "Above All It's the Songs", the band sounds like it is siphoning beats from proggy Nintendo soundtracks. (Think "Contra".) The clean tones and blistering velocity call to mind the nerdy precision of both the Advantage and their Load Records compatriots Lightning Bolt.
Then add to that technocratic flavor a little dash of the Teutonic. Arguably, the loops here (especially on "Tulsa", "Above All It's the Songs") have that icy Krautrock ease that would fit nicely in a Neu! record: it's the tangled, Magma-style noodling, the childlike and chanting delivery, and the spacebound solos ("Florida") that set it apart, giving the record not only a mystical texture but astronomical scale. Compared to past releases, the new keeps just the right amount of the pastoral: not much. The record is called Space Programs, after all. Where their last outing, Wohaw, strayed too far into the protest-folk forests of Woodstock, Space Programs finds a better balance of campfire intimacy and the slashing intricacy of Sunset at the End of the Industrial Age. More a lyrical evocation, rather than a merciless deconstruction, of the white man's burden, the Trail of Tears, manifest destiny, empire, and James Kirk's final frontier, the record fits neatly into the USA Is a Monster's furious discography.
