The creative mind is perhaps nowhere freer to indulge itself than in the margins of a college-ruled notebook, the
most lawless of places, where the restrictive logic of straight lines,
physics equations, and complete sentences gives way to the vertiginous,
free-associative liberty of blank space and wandering thoughts. Here,
the ballpoint pen and subconscious mind can do as they please,
emancipated from any need for coherence or completion. This is the
realm of the doodle—the most spontaneous, honest, and
blessedly juvenile art form ever devised by man, wherein the
distinction between inanity and profundity is rendered utterly void.
Here, black-and-white line drawings of a bong-hitting Mr. Spock, a
weeping Freddy Krueger, and a giant reel-to-reel-tape-head-man with
swastika-adorned teeth can float cozily next to bits of illustrated
text reading “Beach Brains” or “Puker Corpse,” much as they do on the
jacket of Sick to Death, the outstanding debut LP by local
noise-punk tunesmiths Eat Skull.
The year-old pop-stained quartet’s
songs are themselves the musical equivalent of doodles, perfect in
their off-the-cuff hallucinatory tumult and—for all their buried
hooks’ rough edges and peculiarity—stubbornly unforgettable.
There are moments on Sick to Death that fall comfortably
into an identifiable genre—most often early hardcore and sunny
’60s West Coast pop—but they invariably pass within seconds, as
rapid-fire power chords, shouted chants, and pogo-inducing beats bleed
into Phil Spector-style percussive sparseness, simple vocal melodies,
and roller-rink organ drones in a kind of happy, disorienting vagrancy
that underscores the essential continuity between punk and pop in their
teen-driven origins. The casual, fluid manner of Eat Skull’s frequent
stylistic elisions, along with the discrete, one-off quality of each
trebly track (to say nothing of the thick veneer of analog fuzz under
which they all gyrate), recalls the spirit of the first unexpected
singles of the early ’90s lo-fi giants Pavement, Sebadoh, and Guided by
Voices. Startlingly, the highlights of the album—”Shredders on
Fry” and “Punk Trips”—fully live up to that legacy.
And then there is the production style: An intentionally noisy,
first-take-loving, tape-based approach familiar to fans of Eat
Skull’s Siltbreeze labelmates and peers Times New Viking and
Psychedelic Horseshit, who have been collectively identified by the
press as the avant-garde of a neo-garage movement called everything
from “New Lo-Fi” to “Shitgaze” to, oddly, “Clowning on Bitches.”
Depending on your ears’ flexibility, the textural din will either seal
the deal for you, or break it. In either case, it is undeniably a core
element of the Eat Skull sound, and it belies the members’ background
in and love for abstract experimental music. Only—as vocalist,
keyboardist, and guitarist Rob Enbom notes—”It’s really fucking
hard to party to that stuff.” Consider Sick to Death the
solution to that conundrum: an ecstatic, inebriated, punk party record
for noise freaks.
Eat Skull celebrate the release of Sick to
Death on Friday, June 6, at East End with the Hunches, Mayyors, and
DJ Blackhawk. They play again on Sunday, June 8, at Twilight
Café and Bar with Psychedelic Horseshit, Fabulous Diamonds, and
Mayyors.