I could always respect that Jay Reatard went and collaborated with all kinds of people and projects. Lost Sounds or Terror Visions reminded me that it doesn't matter what you're using, punk is punk and it's good to get out of your comfort zone and experiment with whatever someone has lying around. Drew Owen from Sick Thoughts has gone and found an ancient drum machine to lay out more of his layers and layers of blown out guitar tones bedroom punk.
A-Side's "Violent Pacifier" has some psych phasered mechanical drums with layers of scuzzy guitar sweeping across the channels. This has all the best kind of noise smothering this track like the classic punk synth of Digital Leather, it's got just enough melting electronics to lean away from traditional punk. But that's what this is all about; twisting knobs and making a great pounding mess of delay and buried guitars, screaming that title lyric in some kind of chorus. Cut wide for maximum volume, it's a quick track of power sludge that plays with metal solos and feedback over that metronome casio beat. Cuts off just like the cassette it was recorded on.
The B-Side is a cover of Gary Wrong's "Setting Fire to Your Loft" where DD keeps the creepiness of the original and ramps up the tempo with this shifting in and out of focus boombox beat. He cuts right to the heart of what made this original track so crazy and gets damaged like the vocal from Blank Dogs. The guitars are a dense muddy sludge of bass heavy frequencies but he layers in some high cranky static guitar just turning the instrument into every possible tool for this horror psych production. I like that Drew is single minded and going for it with whatever he's got, fidelity be damned. It can still work when it's not about a label.
Get this freaking box set already - from Windian Records.
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