dis-

The Historically Troubled Third Album (Sonic Bubblegum/Cargo)
by Nik Rainey

Being an incurable verbophile, I’m a sucker for good song titles, and the new album by Milwaukee’s dis- has some of the best I’ve come across in a squirrel’s age.

“Hamartia, My Ass,” “The Day We Danced In Your Swimsuit,” “Do All The Good Ones Have Muslim Names?” (to name but three)… having such names laying sideways right next to an artist’s rendering of Stan Laurel wearing Gene Simmons’ makeup shows them to be a band after my own heart even before I crack the shrink-wrap. Of course, such titular japery could lead you to believe that the music within is just clever collegiate buffoonery, good for one smirking listen then onto the shelf to molder beside all the old Dr. Demento comps. Not so. Quite the opposite, in fact – this is heady stuff that requires your full attention through several spins for you to adequately grasp the contours of its cerebral soundscape. The trio constructs a complex architecture of skewed sound semiotics, a little like the quieter instrumental passages of Bad Moon Rising-era Sonic Youth if you were to remove them from their more purgative surroundings and gaffer-tape them together. Over these exploratory settings, vocalist/guitarist Chris Fuller lays on lyrics that read like the journal entries of a cynical, chain-smoking, first-year philosophy student. These guys peel all the listener-friendly artifice off rock in search of the kind of purity that repels the advances of major label A&R reps (no wonder Albini likes ’em), requiring the listener to meet it on its own terms. Are you willing?