The RadioActivist

There’s “weird for the sake of being weird,” and then there’s bands like the White Mice who base their entire existence around it. There have been plenty of bands who’ve ridden a wave of success at least in part on their aesthetic gimmicks. Gwar, certainly; the Aquabats to a degree; and even more so, the Locust, who undoubtedly dealt a great deal of influence to the grindingly noisy, fully-costumed, God-hating White Mice. But whereas the other bands of the bundle subsidize their outlandish attire with substantial musical talent, the White Mice are content to merely molest the listener with repetitive, almost industrial noise. Unquestionably, one of the beauties of music is that there are no rules dictating some ratio of style and substance, but the White Mice clearly lean on the former like a crutch. Despite the walls of droning inert noise that make up the compositions on Ganjahovahdose, there are some kind of cool things going on. The cryptic audio clips of movie and TV broadcasts sp...

You know what’s bullshit? When bands are so lazy and unoriginal with their name that they take--for their own--the name of an already established band both within their own country and, even worse, within their own genre of music. The example here is that it necessitates any reference to this Liturgy as “the Brooklyn black metal band,” not Liturgy “the Chicago death metal band.” No one would be dumb enough to name their Long Island skatepunk band Pennywise, so why can’t metalheads think of something new? Yeah, I know, there are two groups of Subhumans and a pair of Youth Brigades, but this was well before the internet in a time where such excuses could be legitimated. That’s the first thing about this that pisses me off. The second is more inherent in the style but no less distracting. I’ll admit without shame I’m no scholar of black metal, but it’s a little tedious being assaulted by an inexhaustible chain of blast beats song after song for 45 minutes. These compositions, almost by de...

There’s no way you could possibly take enough drugs to make this album good. There’s no way you could possibly take enough drugs to make this album tolerable There’s no way you could possibly take enough drugs to make this album. …Unless your name is Joe Newman, and in 1987 you decided to throw together a chaotic spattering of spastic Casio melodies, schizophrenic children’s vocals, and drum machine cadences under the guise of the Rudy Schwartz Project and call it Bowling for Applicances. The only noteworthy effort to legitimize this sonic earfuck in its press material is that allegedly Jello Biafra is a fan. This isn’t actually a huge surprise as it seems Jello isn’t a hard sell as long as an artist is strange and doesn't follow some set of rules. The vaguely similar Casio-punk of the late, great Wesley Willis is an example of music that Biafra not only endorsed but released on his Alternative Tentacles label. But where Willis lacked the complex compositions of the Rudy Schwartz P...