"Helen Butte" Vs. Masonna Pussy Badsmell

"Helen Butte" Vs. Masonna Pussy Badsmell Artist: To Live & Shave in LA
Label: Caroline Distributio
Category: Music


Average customer rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1


UPC: 798686323529
EAN: 0798686323529
ASIN: B000001C5E


Release Date: 1996-08-06

"Helen Butte" Vs. Masonna Pussy Badsmell


Related Categories:

General General
Categories | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music
Indie Rock Indie Rock
Categories | Indie & Lo-Fi | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music
Noise Noise
Categories | Rock | Alternative Styles | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music
General General
Categories | Rock | Styles | Music
Pop Rock Pop Rock
Categories | Pop | Styles | Music
Experimental Music Experimental Music
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Tracks:

  1. Root Of Pop Compulsion
  2. Tina Russell. Free
  3. Take A Lot Of Ofay
  4. The Ass God
  5. Open City '72
  6. Shit If They Hit
  7. Spelvin, The Righteous Bush
  8. Veinsearchin'
  9. Superhype Security Probe
  10. My Third Decade Of Ultrafuck
  11. Crypt Rocket, Tomb Rocket, Turd Rocket
  12. The 'Six' In The Six Wolves
  13. Mizrahi Speculum
  14. I Learn To Inject Morphia
  15. Lady Deadlock
  16. Hypecuff
  17. A Low Mass Will Be Said
  18. I Suppress Nothing
  19. Wanna Bust Up A Virgin Ass?
  20. One Navel Of Decline
  21. Rexroth, Cozy Cool
  22. I Used To Pay A Heavy Bribe
  23. Kama Sutra '71
  24. Anne's Eager Bottom
  25. Shivman Destroys Spoonman
  26. 'Godspike' Soph. Hoax
  27. Theresa Soder In My Hot Hands
  28. Television's Over
  29. American Car
  30. Gone And Bitched Up
  31. I Slur A Name
  32. Tealink
  33. First Pop Novice
  34. Lock Of Gut Twine
  35. Balling Andrea True
  36. Bataille=No Stripe
  37. In The Assworks

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars The genius of To Live and Shave in L.A., partially revealed........2002-10-13

Well, this album won't make the fans of Japanese noise music very happy, but for other, more adventurous souls...

To Live and Shave in L.A., always elusive in their intent (and thus frequently misunderstood and reviled), are now critically revered, viewed primarily as the band who "destroyed" noise orthodoxy by presenting a scurrilous, irreverent new paradigm.

They mocked underground culture mercilessly, but reserved their most foul approbations for themselves. They lacerated their recordings, gleefully ripping them to shreds with manic dub intensity, re-packaging everything in absurdist "free-glam" garb.

It was an approach that few Japanese noise purveyors could even begin to fathom (although The Boredoms' brilliant Yamantanka Eye, an avowed TLASILA fan, seemed to work within an equally bizarre parallel universe); artists such as Merzbow and (Canadian elders) Nihilist Spasm Band seemed, in comparison to To Live and Shave in L.A., to be stuck in a previous century. The shift was that dramatic, that sudden.

With the recent canonization of TLASILA's mad ringleader Tom Smith (interviews and reviews in The Wire, The New York Times, other "high-toned" publications who once would have blanched at running a piece on such a motley ensemble), it has become obvious that Smith and To Live and Shave in L.A. were working on an altogether higher level. They blended hyper-literate texts (see this album's "The Six in The Six Wolves," "I Slur a Name," "A Low Mass Will Be Said" for proof) with hyper-speed, musique-concrete deconstructions of rock sonics, all filtered through a Crypt/Estrus low-fi aesthetic.

(The irony is that Smith worked as a professional sound engineer for a television network, and recorded all of TLASILA's ten albums at state-of-the-art facilities!)

"Helen Butte" is maddening, of course. It's mastered in a very odd fashion, and mixed in such a way as to defeat comprehension. These shadings, although intentional, could have been discarded. Only toward the end of the album, when the piano intro to "Bataille = No Stipe" crackles out of one's home speakers, do things begin to resemble "music."

Elsewhere, the multi-tracked insanity spirals in all directions, with massed layers of voices colliding with heavily fuzzed bass guitar riffs (reminiscent of the playing of King Crimson alumnus John Wetton) and screeching, sputtering oscillators.

Smith claimed to have a "production epiphany" in late 1995, and this assertion seems to be an accurate one. Subsequent albums (1997's "Tonal Harmony," released in the UK on tiny independent Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers, 1998's "Where a Horse Has Been Standing and Where You Belong," issued in the USA on the micro-indie Western Blot, and 2002's widely-praised 2-CD masterpiece "The Wigmaker") seem to explode off the stereo, yielding dual delights - their cool textual inscrutability was at last matched by equally brazen obelisks of continuously fragmenting sonics. Sheer madness!

TLASILA broke up in 2000, and in their wake a slew of new groups (such as New York's Sightings, Lexington, Kentucky's Hair Police, Switzerland's OHNE, who record for the prestigious Mego label) have rushed into the vacuum. All site To Live and Shave in L.A. as a signal influence.

"Helen Butte" is a transitional work, but at least half of its tracks hit home, striking with weird unpredictability.

They definitely weren't noise, or junk, or whatever label old-school fundamentalists prefer to attach to their music. To Live and Shave in L.A. were that rarity - sui generis, completely without precedent.

If the nude centerfold of the obviously drugged-out Smith doesn't put you off, then you're in for an anti-musical treat with "Helen Butte." Give it a listen, but remember to leave the lights on!

2 out of 5 stars So much junk rock is better than this..........2000-12-06

With the existence of stuff like Lasse Marhaug, mid-era Merzbow, Crash Worship, the Nihilist Spasm band, etc. etc. ad nauseam, one wonders why anyone would bother spending money on a band who does it with such artlessness. Anyone can throw equipment around a studio and howl into a microphone (and yes, I realize the stupidity of using that argument when trying to distinguish between junk rock bands), but for some reason, the Americans just don't seem to have mastered the art in the same way others have. Perhaps it's because the Japanese, the Norwegians, et al. don't record and release without a couple of steps in the middle. When you hear a junk rock release by Merzbow, it's obvious there was some cleaning, a whole lot of cut-and-paste, and an eye toward the wholeness of a composition involved. With TLASILA, if anything on here had post-production work done to it, or if there were any pre-planning involved, I can't hear it.

The new listener to junk rock is advised to seek out early Merzbow recordings (Merzbox Sampler contains a number of tracks from that era, and is much more avaliable than most of his early stuff is in its original form) or the recent Jazzkammer disc Hot Action Sexy Karaoke for a much better example of what can be accomplished by breaking stuff.

5 out of 5 stars An experience in sonic enlightenment.......1998-08-10

Sick, twisted, and only blown away by live performances of the material, there are no easy ways to describe this album except you can achieve half of the tone by putting your radio stations between signals, pushed up to ten, put a meagaphone next to your head and have someone scream loudly while thumping on a bass guitar.

Music Album:

  1. Thunderbox ~ Humble Pie
  2. Early Years
  3. I.F. 001-011 ~ Quintron
  4. Dear Everybody ~ Scott Carpenter , and Real McCoys
  5. Roolettes ~ Roolettes
  6. Extended Versions ~ Hall & Oates
  7. Super Hits of 1956 ~ Various Artists
  8. Suffocating Under Words of Sorrow ~ Bullet for My Valentine
  9. Operation Hummingbird ~ Death in June
  10. Tongue ~ Penelope Houston

Music Album

Music Album

Music CD

From Me to You: A Tribute to Lionel Hampton ~ Terry Gibbs

Sing The Hits Of Evergreens - Jazz Cabaret Songs (Karaoke)

Still Alive ~ Franco

Complete Recordings, Volume 1 ~ Bessie Smith

Music of John Graas ~ John Graas

World Became the World ~ PFM

I Successi Di-Pensiero D'amore ~ Mal

Around the Piano ~ Yuka Kawamura

Enka Hitosuji/ Bachan ~ Yusuke Oda

Spring in the Air ~ Paddy O'Brien & Daithi Sproule James Kelly