You can kind of get the measure of a band sometimes from the name and the names of their albums. Here, Butthole Surfers have gone for the “random collection of nouns at least one of which is designed to evoke an emotive response” route. As I recall from band T-shirts at the time, I think the “o” in “Butthole” is supposed to by encircled by lines to look vaguely like a sphincter, but maybe that typography comes later.
I was expecting maybe some noise/hardcore kind of sound, which they do, but not entirely. They veer into the experimentalism / transgressive feel of Throbbing Gristle, but not quite as far – the tracks on here, though often grimy and wierd, are never not listenable.
Human Cannonball is the most normal and straightforward. Graveyard is more typical of the wandering fuzz-fest of noise that form most of the tracks on the album, while The O-Men is one of the more experimental. Kuntz is basically a Thai song (The Fear by Phloen Phromdaen) where the Butthole Surfers pick out a particular word (or rather, Thai word that sounds like an English profanity) and amplify/echo it when it appears – you can guess what from the title. From the words of Jackie by Jacques Brel/Scott Walker/Mark Almond, it’s cute, in a stupid-ass way. While plainly just mucking about, they’re unafraid to travel to dark places of the human psyche, with a spine-chilling confession of a sexual assault survivor in 22 Going On 23. In its underlying wake-up call, it kind of reminded me of the part in the Bible (Judges as I recall) where the hapless concubine gets chopped up and sent to the rulers to show how lawless the land had become.
Although it’s not immediately evident from the sound, Butthole Surfers have two drummers - King Coffey and Teresa Nervosa – who would perform standing, and pretend to be siblings. Singer Gibby Hynes uses various effects (physical and electronic) on his voice to give distortion and distance, a method refferred to as “Gibbytronix”. Like Throbbing Gristle, a lot of their more notorious and outre behaviour stems from their stage shows, usually featuring nudity and stage blood. Reminds me of the Tragedian from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - “I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood”.
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