5 out of 5

Label: Skin Graft Records

Produced by: Weasel Walter

I’ve been fortunate to have a few life-changing music experiences in my life, and one of them was seeing Arab on Radar, live, which was followed a few years later by purchasing Yahweh Or The Highway.

I considered myself a pretty cool kid, and understood there was some weird, funky fresh music out there, and also some really aggressive, heavy music, and I thought I listened to things from both of those columns and their crossovers. I believe I’ve told bits of this story elsewhere, but: an equally cool friend of mine (okay, he was probably cooler) convinced me to go to a show that I was eye-rolling over: The Locust.

The Locust was a hot-shit-of-the-moment band, and I knew their fans and I knew the gist of their thing and I was just, like, over it, because I was so super duper cool. But I went to the show because, like, I was also a super duper cool friend who did favors like going outside with other people.

I honestly don’t remember much of Locust’s live show, but I do remember the other band on the ticket: AoR. Alongside some Skeleton Key shows, this was an experience like no other, and not necessarily one that made me like their music, but just an event where I got to see a band being totally bizarre, even when it… wasn’t really working with the crowd. Some people in front were into the caterwauling of Eric Paul, or the way Craig Kureck’s drum kit was just one floor drum and hi-hat that kept falling over (alongside Kureck); most people seemed kind of puzzled. It was very noisy. It was strange.

Art rock – and bands doing this kind of extreme, outsider shtick – have been around and are still around, but I think I got to experience the last wave of pre-social media exposure, when word-of-mouth carried things; the era that’s produced grainy videos that are now barely watched youtube clips, because people didn’t think of recording on their flip phones at the time. No, I don’t mean to imply that was a better time, just different. At the very least, such phenomena felt more self-possessed than something artists maybe participated in for likes, if only subconsciously. And so that was my first time witnessing a spectacle of that sort.

I carried memories of that show with me for a while, filing it away with curious looks at folks who bought AoR’s albums. Some vague amount of time after that, I started collecting the Skin Graft Records label, and look: that band that weirded me out was on there. And with trepidation, I bought Yahweh or the Highway, giving myself internal curious looks. Cellophane peeled, worried glances at a lyric sheet full of references to penises, and then the CD went into a discman and I hit play…

And yeah, my life changed again. I really can credit this album with sending me off on a particular trajectory of enjoyment of both weirder and harsher music. Listening to Yahweh now, it’s hilariously tuneful compared to some other stuff that I listen to, but I still hear how absolutely atonal and batshit it is, shaping the dance-pop of their early material and the somewhat more open-ended outsider rock of Soak the Saddle into absolutely killer gems of Paul’s perversions and blistering, Yona-Kit drum beats, and bass fuzzed up to the max giving it this grooving low end, and the shrill guitar hitting these bizarre, impossible licks that take place on the highest register. With Weasel Walter at the peak of his skills, this is Luttenbachers barrage, but with an inherent balance of pacing and melody that the group had learned, giving the album ebb and flow.

I can’t say enough about this album. Its lyrics perhaps seem like shock material, but I’d argue that this was also Paul turning his obsessions into little cryptic puzzles of masculinity crises and other insecurities; and every moment of a track that seems structured just to make music normies scream for some peace and quiet is balanced out by this core danceable vibe to the disc – like Devo, whipped into a drug-fueled frenzy.

I never go to live shows anymore, and perhaps I’m missing another AoR experience. Then again, I think there’s something to the rarity of such experiences, and if it happened again, might’n’t I shrug at it and think, yeah, I guess that’s okay, but…

And in the same way, whenever I hear a band getting kooky and weird in a similar vein, I might pick up their album, but it’s a sure bet I’ll be circling back around to relisten to Yahweh, soon after.