Boredoms

Collecting the contents of the band's first two Japanese releases, Onanie Bomb shows that, from the start, the Boredoms were interested in musical chaos of a most unique degree. Rough but not lo-fi, Onanie rips, stomps, and explodes all over the place in several directions at once. Purists might object to calling some of what is whipped up "songs," but the goofy insanity in the death-march-meets-squalling-cartoon-voices of "We Never Sleep," and even the song titles which reach beyond over the top, like "Lick'n Cock Boatpeople" and "Anal Eater," could only be resisted by the stodgiest of souls. For all the extreme noise at play, what's evident on Onanie is the sheer sense of fun, much like the Boredoms' early inspirations, the Butthole Surfers. Thus, "Bite My Bollocks" sounds like a '50s strut and stroll revisited after several apocalypses -- a party where everyone has lost any sense of trying to be cool; where everyone wants to not merely burn down the house, but smash it to atoms. More than a few sounds wouldn't seem out of place on some of Yoko Ono's early albums, but there's something just a little more gone about tracks like the hyper-speed thrash of "No Core Punk" and "Melt Down Boogie"; they aren't so much stretching the boundaries of rock as they are torpedoing them and tossing the bits around in the air. One track ends with extended burp noises that eventually fade into semi-nothingness; another seems to consist of feedback noises recorded in a sheet metal factory and interspersed with wails and sudden attempts at solos. Topping off all of that with album art indicating that the performers play such instruments as "bicyclesynth," "tennis," and "kick & hit & shot," and clearly, the Boredoms aren't catering to "normalville" -- nobody is in Kansas anymore. ~ Ned Raggett, Rovi