Lard – Pure Chewing Satisfaction – Review

Lard

Pure Chewing Satisfaction (Alternative Tentacles)
by Nik Rainey

Yeahhh… it’s back, up from the soil and ready to poke precise holes into the weakest parts of Amerika’s sheltering skin. No, it ain’t Nixon draggin’ his phlebitis’d legs through the Yorba Linda night, using his jowls to conduct his unholy minions in a zombified chorus of “four more years… four more years…,” we’re talkin’Lard. That’s right, the twelve-gauge nuptials between the electro-metallic Ministrations of Al (“Work For Love”) Jourgensen and Paul Barker and the erstwhile Georgie Orwell of punk, Jello (“Down and Out in Paris, London, and On the Floor of the Gilman Street Station”) Biafra have been renewed after a six-year separation, to fiddle (with knobs and switches) while Romerica burns anew. I mean, why bother with the latest politi-funk poot from Rage Against the Toaster Oven when you can let Pure Chewing Satisfaction warp your woofers and make you giggle like Richard Widmark pushing the Statue of Liberty down the Capitol steps? The same sociosurrealist wit that informed such past lines as “next time we have sex, just pretend that I’m Ed Meese” and “which came first, Max Headroom or Gerald Ford?” (to explain for those of you too young to remember that wacky character: he was the 38th President.) is in rare form here, using his distinctively annoying voice to rip into the likes of “War Pimp Renaissance” and “Generation Execute” like Rush Limbaugh at a luau, piling on jabs at militiamen, televised executions, and even us (“Reagan children flunk out at love/ It’s always someone else’s fault”) within a monolithic maelstrom (featuring the last recorded beats of the late Jeff Ward) that’s thankfully more Psalm 69 than Filth Pig. (A little too relentless, perhaps – one misses the dynamics and Swans-edelic workouts of their first EP [which was actually longer than this, but never mind] and Jello’s points sometimes risk getting lost amongst the slam-racket, but all the better to point you towards the shocking, revelatory and hilarious newsprint collage in the lyric booklet. Damn, but Hillary looks hot in that bondage gear.) Minor caveats aside, it’s good to hear the ever-committed Biafra bending quixotically sinister at our nation’s bent windmills over a bed of noise once again. In a world annexed by apathy, false entitlement, and blithe ignorance, (allow me to apologize for this beforehand…) there’s always room for Jello.