It was Hunter S. Thompson who wrote that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. And no band ever hitched itself to that axiom better than the Butthole Surfers. It didn't seem possible back in the mid-1980s that a band with that name and as fond of abstract noise collage as these Austin, Texas wastoids were could be anything near commercial. After all, this was the decade in which it was hip to be square. But times change. The alternative explosion of the early '90s allowed the lunatics to run the asylum for a while, and the Butthole Surfers transformed into an efficient (if still very odd) hard rock ensemble.

Protracted contract difficulties prevented the band from striking while they were still hot from 1996's Beck-inspired "Pepper" single. So now, five years later, these musical mad professors have apparently fallen in love with computers and decided to manipulate their strange desires with hard-drive abandon. The obvious jumping-off point is the Kid Rock collaboration and the album's first single, "The Shame of Life" (RealAudio excerpt). With the driving rhythm by drummer King Coffey and bassist Nathan Calhoun and the admission "I love the girls and the money and the shame of life," the Surfers teeter on the brink of conventional rock values. However, throughout the new album, singer Gibby Haynes drives the proverbial truck into the ditch with rambling psychotic speeches. He warps Malcolm X rhetoric for the title track, sounding like a cross between an inept concert promoter and a TV evangelist. "They cut me off at the clinic ... maybe I'm bipolar," he bellows during "Sh-- Like That," the tune most recalling the band's glory days with a sonic low end meant to rumble your bowels.

Paul Leary's guitar-string mangling is less prevalent here, as most tracks are built from the beat up and fly or die based on how effectively the noises have been integrated. "Dracula From Houston" (RealAudio excerpt) contains primal, three-chord riffing backed with maniacal laughter for extra punch, whereas "Mexico" stumbles into dull space noises and an uninspired "God, Zeus, Allah ..." chant. As the album closes down, it resembles such Butthole classics as 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse and 1987's Locust Abortion Technician. "The Last Astronaut" and, especially, the creepy, rambling "Yentel" (RealAudio excerpt) are the sound not of weirdos turning pro, but of weirdos turning on.