Alice Donut

Pure Acid Park (Alternative Tentacles)
by Joshua Brown

These here folks typify everything that is New York City. Bizarre, brilliant, deadpan humor set to music. And it’s definitely not a parody of anything, but rather a consciousness-raising. The consciousness they reflect is that of the guy standing in Central Park with his hands raised, thinking it his duty to keep all the birds up in the air. The middle-aged woman who gets a vicarious thrill in flaunting her terrible dress sense and the fact that she wears way too much of the wrong color makeup. The bespectacled art dude who feeds his cynicism with psychedelic drugs.

I think it’s fair to say that Pure Acid Park is Alice Donut‘s strongest release to date. They earn extra points with a great interpretation of Roky Erickson’s “I Walked With A Zombie” (one of my all time favorite tunes, which REM, of all people, covered on the Roky tribute album). Pure Acid Park is, in a sense, the album that the Butthole Surfers should have made before going industrial. What the Donuts do here is take catchy, popacid punk tunes and slur the instruments in just the right places for maximum tweak.