SMOGTOWN:
domesticviolenceland: CD
There are days and there are foot-stomping, pin-your-ears-back, wake-up-wanting-to-run-through-walls, need-something-to-blow-the-top-off-your-skull days. Those are Smogtown days. Domesticviolenceland is a brutal record. What it lacks in the narrative finesse characteristic of Führer's of the New Wave it makes up for in ferocity. Guitardo doesn't do walls of sound, he cuts a swath through the silence, stabbing at the empty spaces. My favorite track-of-the-minute, "Dead Actors," is their fastest song yet. It starts like a siren. Wailing guitar. Terminal bass loop. Relentless drum beat. Chavez spits non sequitors like shotgun Da-Da inoculated with instamatic irony. It's an ambush. A sneak attack on the abstract phoniness of the television programming that tries hardest to convince us of its replication of reality. But is it really just a satire, a silly spoof? Forget Holden Caulfield. Forget Homer Simpson. The final line "violence is celebrity" is a 100% accurate, non-ironic reflection of the present state of the media in this country. That's so fucked-up. –jim (Disaster)