Alice Donut - Dry Humping The Cash Cow (CD) NEW

This CD is brand new

Starting in the late '80s as one of the flagship bands on Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles label, they plied a sour, sleazed-out, psychedelic noise-pop like Jane's Addiction and the Pixies were stuck in a tenement building with Charles Bukowski and his scummy friends. They also had a fine line in fascinatingly grotesque (not just gross) lyrics. Unlike a lot of similar groups at the time, they had an uncanny pop sensibility, which grew and grew and finds its apotheosis in this latest (comeback) album, which is stuffed with the kind of musical and lyrical quirks one would more normally associate with Stephen Malkmus than any hardcore punk.
'Madonna's Bombing Sarajevo', the opener, is a case in point as it unfurls through dark muttering backed with grinding guitar (almost sounding like Tool's 'Rosetta Stoned' at points) through self-deprecating jabs at the band's own perennial underdog status (similar to several Pavement songs) and finally to a mellow trumpet part snaking around sardonic dismissals of various pop star celebrities who think they can save the world (you know who I mean...). This is followed with 'Little Monkey', which proposes a feminist revisionist take on "Peter Pan" entitled "Hangman's Tree" (?), and 'The Unnoticed Fall' which describes, to a slightly grating speed-punk, various still-living contemporaries of Eliot, Joyce and Pound speaking at a funeral. Huh?

Alice Donut are a Huh? kind of band. Give or take a few distinctly directionless moments ('Johnny's In The Basement'), 'Fuzz' careens through a rather unique worldview. 'The Puny & Revolting Men Of Advertising Smile' could be a rant from Richard E. Grant's character in "How To Get Ahead In Advertising". 'Glam' is a boggling mass of phasers and echoes and duck-walking bass, one of those songs where each instrument seems to be playing a completely different thing but the result hangs together anyway. Best of all is 'Days Away (At The Wake Of A Friend)', which blends the Pogues with Ween and even a hint of Killing Joke's folkier moments ('Lanterns Of Hope', 'You'll Never Get To Me', etc.) for a raucous, incandescent celebration of life (and getting trolleyed).

It'll no doubt sell about two copies but you shouldn't bet against the band releasing a hundred more things, living in poverty or no. This is American indie rock at its best - charming, quirky and warped.