On stage, the members of Providence, R.I.'s the White Mice, who go by the names Anonymouse, Euronymouse, and Mousferatu, wear mouse masks and bloodied clothes, giving off the appearance of a lab experiment gone horribly awry. Most of their pun-filled song titles are mouse-related-- either dealing with cheese, traps, or the rodents themselves. If it weren't for the disturbing barrage of noise on ASSPhIXXXEATATESHUN, the whole thing might come off as either oddly cute, blandly gimmicky, or as some sort of PETA protest. But the only things the White Mice seem to be protesting are good taste, traditional song structure, and anything remotely resembling a melody.
The noise-metal miscreants use drums, bass, and an oscillator to create a gloriously god-awful racket. Most of the songs clock in at around two minutes and follow the grindcore style of relentlessly bludgeoning the listener over the head with brutal drums and distorted-beyond-recognition instruments. The vocals, which are buried in the mix, seem to consist primarily of howls and wails, at times so seamlessly blending with the squealing feedback that it's difficult to tell there's a human behind them.
The songs that come closest to having a structure are the longer ones, comparatively speaking. "Limburger Baby" spends an echoing minute building up a spacey, sci-fi atmosphere before busting wide open into a full-on assault. "Mouse Trap" begins with swirling oscillator tones leading into a jerky rhythm that plays out for the bulk of the song. The title can even been heard over and over beneath the horror of alarm-clock buzz and booming bass guitar. Similarly, "Slo Poison" suits its name, creeping through three-and-a-half minutes of sludge as if it's slowly shutting down your nervous system.
While everything on the disc could certainly qualify as noise, there are several tracks that wear that label more obviously than others. Opener "Foreskin Rug" utilizes sliced-and-diced rushes of buzz-saw tones on top of slo-mo rumble. "Dieorhearama" picks up this theme nine songs later and adds the swoosh of back-masked drums and squealing feedback on top.
The disc's final track is "Microjackass", which spans almost 50 minutes (over twice the length of the other 10 tracks combined). Over its first four minutes the song builds in speed and intensity before fading to static; by minute five, silence has set in. It's not until 43 minutes later that we get the final burst: a quick blast of a repeating drum and bass beat, ringing oscillator tones, and a telephone operator delivering a voice-mail message. While it's been a common gag since the early 90s to include a bonus track at the tail end of a CD, forcing the listener to wear out the fast-forward button accessing the track, it seems here that the silence is a part of the song. The White Mice want you to think you've escaped harm, and at the last conceivable moment, the trap snaps down on your neck.
