Skippy and the Bottlerockets, Sponge Off Me Trousers, Mate. Blueball CD 1107X, $17.95.
This sad imitation of a 1970s
With tracks like “My Pooch, Arnold” and “Txt Me a Lover,” the group delves into embarrassing autobiography, including sour boasts about drug trips aborted by born-again excursions on the Christian-Rock circuit.
Lead singer Elmore “Skippy” Beaglehole has declined even further than in his disastrous outings during last summer’s Poppapalooza, and rhythm guitarist Mac Bindweed has evidently gone stone deaf.
Little else to say except don’t buy this one if you can steal it. ###
Gnostic Gnowledge, Eating Downtown
Here at last is a band from Oz that doesn’t know how to say “uncle” or “we surrender” or even “leave me alone.” In this live recording—from the huge Woop Woop Liberation Festival in 2005—the audience clearly wants to be shut of the pesky quartet, but these antipodean rockers are more tenacious and immovable than Geo. W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld welded together.*
Most of the CD is taken up by outrageous crowd noise but unfortunately the band’s insipid Neo-BG music sometimes seeps from the chaos. The best track is “Banana Girl,” a two-minute raver in the late style of Chuck Berry. Nothing else comes close to this one, since all other tracks are “tribute” moments dedicated to ABBA. ###
Wun Def Goy, Bling Blang Bro. Momotown ABC-3, $15.45.
Multiethnic WDG (sino-afro-honky) debuts here with a searing solo attack on middle-class middle-American values and attitudes, following in the steps of white guys trying to do rap like that guy from Detroit named after cheap candy.
Riffs like “Papa Pooped a Papoose” and “I’m onna smack yo haid onna dam ole fridge” are hypnotic in effect and virtually endless in duration. This guy needs to be teamed up with a hip back-up group like the Wretched Armadillos for maximum effect.
Aside from references to misogyny, necrophilia, infanticide, arson and intraspecies miscegenation, his CD deserves the clean-as-a-whistle M13 rating awarded it. Also available ($36.99) as an X-Box video game in which Wun Def Goy takes on the Flying Mario Brothers, Pong and Mrs. Pac-Man in a battle of attrition carefully modeled on the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Fun for all but not for the faint of heart .###
Missy Snodlocker and the Grey Submariner, RU12? Bulbous Pumpkins CD 33046, $11.95 (also available on retro vinyl).
Lots of poignant echoes here—all the cross-dressing transvestite punk bands of
But it doesn’t help dispel the impression of a whirling toilet-bowl vortex projected by numbers like “Werewolf Vegemite” or “Caught Just Outside Steeple Bumstead in the Everlasting Rain.”
Crooner Donna Garter (aka Kevin Bultz) is in good vocal nick but hopelessly out of synch with his five back-up cohorts. At one point, Garter/Bultz is heard to whimper “Some bloody bugger has pinched me favorite crack pipe.” Wonder why?
Still, the overall ambience of authentic decadence and bonhomie carries the day, like a body-line bowler stealing the Ashes one more time for dear old Blighty! Recommended for mature listeners only. ###
*Ed. note: This review was composed before Bush and Rumsfeld were consigned to the Memory Hole, but we left the reference in for the sake of historical correctness.
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Inutility
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