The newest offering from the Butthole Surfers holds out the promise of a potential "return to their roots." The Buttholes, once a wildly experimental and original band, have been plagued recently with a short string of rather mediocre records. Electriclarryland seems to have found a spot 90 degrees from both of those poles--somewhere between a clumsy step forward and a shuffle to the side.
The album gets off to a pretty strong start. Four of the first five tracks are standard Butthole psychoacoustics, with lead singer/wailer Gibby Haynes rambling on about something or the other. Good stuff. The fifth tune, "Pepper," also the album's first single, sounds a heck of a lot like Beck's "Loser."
The Buttholes have a long history of almost covering songs, such as "Sweat Loaf" of off Locust Abortion Technician (sort of a cover of Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf"), and "Something," from the Piouhgd album (a pseudo-cover/parody of The Jesus and Mary Chain's "Head On"). They even have a history of actual covers, such as "Hurdy Gurdy Man," also from Piouhgd, and "American Woman," from Rembrandt Pussyhorse. Soon after Gibby took the mic from Alien Jourgenson and laid the vocal track for Ministry's Jesus Built My Hotrod, the Buttholes teamed up with producer John Paul Jones (of Led Zeppelin fame) and released Independent Worm Saloon, with its single offering, "Who Was In My Room," that could have blended nicely into the the Ministry disc that Gibby worked on.
Maybe it's all these crazy musical pairings that are diluting the overall intensity of the Buttholes experience. Don't get me wrong--the covers, parodies, and side projects that they've been involved with are cool. The "P" project had Gibby, Johnny Depp, Sal Jenco, and fellow Texan singer/songwriter Bill Carter all in the same place, which is pretty amazing even before you take the music into consideration. The "Jackofficers" album, Digital Dump, contained a catchy slew of butthole rock meets sampler technology--another fun experiment. But the Buttholes seem to be having a bit of an identity crisis, or at the very least, an attention deficit with regard to their main gig.
The last two tracks on Electriclarryland, the hard and distorted "L.A." and the moody "Space," manage to pull the record back out of its vapid midsection, much of which could easily be relegated to background music. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just (at the risk of sounding like I'm romanticising) a far cry from the experimental extremes of their earlier recordings.
