4 out of 5

Label: Skin Graft

Producer: Weasel Walter

Gawd I love noise like this, and I love Skin Graft.  I love that the allmusic review questions listening to this stuff for pleasure.  Sorry bro, some of us just like our music with a dash of brash.  Or more than a dash, actually.

I’ll be honest – I would swear that this was an Arab on Radar followup.  Chloe Lum’s / Claudia Deluxx’s warbled, upper-range bleats are a dead ringer for Eric Paul’s later AOR singing style (assuming Claudia’s a girl, whatever that may imply… search me) (…Without touching me, though.  Unless you’ve washed.) (…And even then, I’m going to say I’m not too keen on it.  Look – why don’t you give me instructions and I’ll do the search m’self, y’get me?) and Yannick Desranleau’s off-beat punctuated drumming style captures the same wicked intensity Craig Kureck brought to Arab’s feverish live shows.  The guitar work (which may be Alex Moskos and Myles Broscoe or just one or the other… it’s hard piecing together credits for bands like this) is a bit looser than Radar’s Jeff Schneider and Steve Mattos, but had Walter tightened the recording a bit, it would be similar enough.  That’s not a sleight though – this is a different band, and that’s what Walter allows to come forward by stepping back and loosening the reigns.  Songs start and stop all of a sudden but play out their 2 minute runtimes at full, full blast, not quite riding a riff into hell as AOR would but starting out with strength – check the title track’s or ‘Gnarly Tooth’s intro – and then letting it pulse to insane extremes.  Occasionally this amounts to unbelievable heights that belong to Weasel’s skills – ‘CH-CH-CH-Chatter’s earth-shattering drums at the end, somehow topping out the noise – and then sometimes it’s all on AIDS Wolf, like the penultimate screamer ‘Relevant Issues.’

The album admittedly doesn’t slow down at all – there’s one pace, and the volume certainly won’t drop below menacingly loud – making you thankful for it being less than a half hour of listenin’, but while you’re in the zone, it also means that some of it’s going to inevitably blend together.  Still – man.  Thanks, Skin Graft.