OLD NOISE (duh)

Tonight, my band, along with a bunch of others (upcoming reviews???), will be doing our best to rip off The Jesus Lizard. And who could blame us? In leu of ranting for half an hour about how the Lizard is the best band ever, we'll take a look at this instead:

SCRATCH ACID : The Greatest Gift (Touch & Go 1990)
This record has everything. Literally. 28 tracks is everthing they recorded, put together in one anthology, and seriously, except for GOAT, you might never hear another more intense record. David Yows vocals (yes, of JesusLizard fame) brings us from Elvis to Danzig to Hank, yet he's still that wierd dude who sounds more like the possessed, speaking in tongues. The songs are everything that rock had been up to that point. In "Monster", it's hardcore punk rock, in "Skin Drips" it's honky tonk ( Yow does his best impression of a harmonica, their might even be a real one in the way background, i can't tell), but through the whole, it's just noise. Most excellent noise. My favorite song would have to be "Owners Lament", a pretty epic song, and i'd have to say uncharacteristic of the rest of the album, with some hints of psychadelic and classic rock, and Yow sounding like a drunk Roy Orbison, and the band reminding me of the MoodyBlues.
Grotesquely wierd at times, Morosely beautiful in others, intense the whole time. But seriously, GOAT. That's it.