Men's Recovery Project, The Golden Triumph of Naked Hostility
Vermiform 1998 review by: Chris Asbestos

When we're confronted with some truly bizarre art, and the possible deranged creativity or just plain madness that produces it, we're, well, never really sure where it comes from. Such is the strange case of Sam McPheeters, singer of legendary briliant-wiseass hardcore band Born Against, when he went on (after his band’s dissolution) to record music with others under the elusive moniker Men’s Recovery Project. Did he get fed up with the louder-faster conventions of punk and want to piss off all the fans he’d attracted, many of who probably didn’t get what he was saying at all? Or did the trappings of the genre finally just piss him off to the extent that he just wanted to do something more sonically adventurous, while most often succumbing to insane silliness for its own sake? Or did he just go crazy, and are the sixty songs on this album (collected from a variety of 7”s and even, I believe, a 5” record) splintered postcards from a muddled, off-the-deep-end's-deep-end subconscious? Trying to figure out this album could keep us here all day.

So maybe you won't be surprised, then, when I call it a thoroughly disorienting experience. From the moment a creepy drone opens the record, with a troubled narrator’s “Hello, I’ll be your entertainment for the evening,” one gets the feeling that this is not so much an album as a devious contraption designed to confuse, then hurt, you. I can only imagine what listening to this on shuffle is like, but, then again, the track sequencing more or less creates this experience off the bat: we’ve got pissed-off hardcore seen through a variety of distancing filter-noise effects (“Use the Brain” and “Abort” are so distorted that you can’t really understand what’s going on; “Get Your Dick Out Of My Food” manages to irritate you in a more subtle way, complete with submerged, nagging synths). We’ve got budget sci-fi film soundtracks (“Ye, Part 1” and “Ye, Part 2” are a bit like Carl Stalling’s cartoon music as remixed by Kraftwerk or Devo). And then we’ve got many, many other varieties of skin-crawling perversity (in the form of “Good Friday, 2033,” a spoken-word apocalyptic fantasy that ends with a drug-sniffing president having sex with Vice President Friend the Robot, and “Man Hole,” which could be described as peaceful synth doodling with the lyrical sensibility of a puzzling obscene phone call).

Sometimes, a powerful blast of noise-rock materializes from the ether: “Why We Are Lazy” hijacks McPheeters’ hoarse, desperate shout from Born Against and places it in the strange context of Big Black drum-machine, percolating moogs, and fuzzy guitar. Halfway through, McPheeters’ vocal is replaced by a lisping Elmer Fudd blurt, which is ultimately as disturbing as it is hilarious: it ends up making you more or less afraid to crack a smile. Similarly, the goofy ambience of an arpeggiated Korg or two can suddenly turn into piercing and painful noise akin to Throbbing Gristle or Aphex Twin’s “Ventolin,” as is the case on the nausea-inducing “Losing Cohesion”; just when you’ve adjusted yourself to its compressed percussion and feedback tone, “Explanation of Arm Troubles” cuts in with some synthesized accordion and what sounds like a church choir amplified via megaphone.

After a lengthier-than-usual passage of caustic hardcore that I’ll guess makes up the band’s earliest work (and in which seems to lay the seed of all the degradation-of-humanity noise bands that followed), another passage of dizzy confusion follows: highlights, this time around, are “You Pay Attention To Me, Not Vice Versa” and “Important Man,” two deadpan caricatures of all we seem to hold meaningful in life, as well as the nose-picking humor (literally) that permeates “Like Me, For Instance.” It's songs like this and the self-explanatory “Undigested Food” all manage to evoke the ridiculous, amazing joke band many of us had around high school.

Maybe that’s what ultimately works about this album, and even makes its home-brew absurdity into something of a landmark among practitioners of the genre: we can all relate in some way to the unfettered flights of delirium expressed herein. We just might not feel entirely comfortable about it.