33 rpm (Alice Donut)
"the nerve center: the Achilles' heel"
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
1990
Alice Donut, MULE
My favorite obscure punk album, MULE sounds like, well, a punk album, one blessed by a songwriter who learned a wrong basic chord sequence. Lots of guitars, switching between fast 4/4, ominous 4/4, and endless new versions of awkward lurch. New Yawk-accented male singer (Tomas Antona) with a somehow adorable whiny alto rasp and a gift for drama and self-aware melodrama. Deep backup vox that are much sillier. Sonic Youth-y mess-around and Tom Waits-styled off-kilter percussions. A cover of "My Boyfriend's Back" translates the song from evasive hint to punk detail: "My boyfriend's back and he's got a Black + Decker! He'll chop you into pieces and feed you to my goldfish!"
So MULE would sound real good even without songwriting. But I'm delighted to have Antona write me a motto like "when I collate, the masses tremble. And when I send a fax, the universe shudders at my ubiquitous fury". "Mother Of Christ" relieves the shortage of rock songs with the words "lactate sin-free", while "Crawlpappy" spits out "Huge! Burly! Obtuse!" as if we were never going to suspect Antona is educated (then it settles into an instrumental trombone-led waltz). "My Severed Head" (messy skewed riffology, trombone) gives away a philosphical bent, worrying about helpless old-age and asking to die from "an act of sheer stupidity, something like a lunchbox falls from a scaffold, drops twenty floors, and crushes me like an insect". There's even something for you folkies, as "Roaches In The Sink" treats "A fed-up Serbian kills archduke Ferdinand, unhinging the wrath of millions. Time to drink myself into oblivion" almost like it was a James Taylor song, assuming J.T. didn't waste time hitting notes, while "Tiny Ugly World", a campfire strumalong by guitarist Ted Houghton, is positively solemn as it softly mourns "Spotlights gleam across a StarSearch nation. A million cries of 'me' drown out the cruel frustations of a normal life". Then "J Train Downtown: A Nest Of Murder", after a skittery xylophone intro, kicks out the jams, the peanut butters, and the 7-grain health breads to "One more stop, boxed-in flesh. One more stop, I can't breathe. One more stop, I can't move. One more stop, the train doors crack, the insects spew, caeserian birth from a festering womb". Sounds like a punk concert to me. Bang heads, mate!
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