World’s End Girlfriend
Seven Idiots
Erased Tapes
You’ve seen the poster about 86% of the weird stuff in the world coming from Japan? Notch that up one full percent – this relentlessly furious and maddeningly tortuous disc pushes Japan that much closer to San Francisco. There are pleasant pop melodies on this disc, although they’ve been sampled and sped up and slowed down until you can’t be sure from whence they came. Promising guitar riffs become buried under Eddie Munster-like back beats, the keyboards produce nothing longer than a semi-hemi-demiquaver, and even the funk-based “Decalogue Minus 8” abandons its Super Fly roots for a Theremin and a rubber duck squeak. You have to focus on this record if you play it; there is not a chance in heck that you can do anything else, like change your oil or vacuum.
The band revels in obscurity: The press photos show everyone dressed in elaborate animal masks, the official website has a nice animation and zero information, the MySpace page directs to a different label, and even the CD sleeve is unreadable without a high resolution ultraviolet scanner. If it wasn’t for WikiLeaks, I’d be lost. I want to like these guys, but it’s as if they deliberately made themselves unlistenable to anyone outside of that late teen, early twenties phase where the more annoying the music is, they better you like it. You’ve been warned.
World’s End Girlfriend: http://Worlds-End-Girlfriend.org • http://www.myspace.com/worldsendgirlfriendworldsendgirlfriend
