Butthole Surfers – Locust Abortion Technician

(Touch and Go, 1987)

“Daddy,”

“Yes son?”

“What does regret mean?”

“Well son, a funny thing about regret is that it’s better to regret something you have done, than regret something you haven’t done. And by the way, if you see your mom this weekend would you be sure and tell her: SATAN!”

I had never listened to Butthole Surfers before but was kind of expecting an introduction like this. I was also expecting the experimental funk-rock style of lead track Sweet Loaf. I was not expecting the myriad of styles and bizarre bursts of adroitness which followed. The combination of funk, punk, heavy metal, noise rock, and psychedelics somehow has an overall industrial feel to it.

Most of the album could be described as gibberish. Interesting gibberish. Thoughtful gibberish. Maybe even meaningful gibberish. But gibberish none the less. There’s a lot of mixing, reversing, and stretching going on throughout the album. Hay is apparently a reversed version of 22 Going on 23, and sounds like it has a few farmyard animals thrown in the mix.

The first appearance of Graveyard (there are two tracks with this title) is slowed down to the point where the vocals are obviously warped but the music remains something which the Smashing Pumpkins would be happy to put out. U.S.S.A. is warped in some form or another; or more likely, some form AND another.

Human Cannonball stands out mainly because it has nothing out of the ordinary going on. It has a very 80’s punk staple drum line and vocal setup. The O-Men is just plain amazing. It’s as if Tweety Bird and the Tasmania Devil have formed a heavy metal band with the Devil himself. The album is rounded out by a track named Kuntz which is a remixing of some Thai recording where apparently the word “itch” (or maybe the Thai word for itch) has been altered in many different ways to make it sound like “cunt”, and we also get a second helping of Graveyard. Here it is not so warped and actually sounds pretty good.

I’m not really sure how to sum up the Butthole Surfers after this. Genius? Ingenious? Anarchic? Eccentric? Grotesque? I think I’ll just describe them, quite simply, as interesting.