Shudder To Think - Hit Liquor
Yeah, this had a music video. The 90's were a strange time for rock. One time, I actually heard this song playing on the radio at a Guitar Center, and wondered whether I'd ended up in an alternate universe where someone had grabbed rock by it's cock and pulled it permanently inside out--like how they used to think female reproductive organs were literally just inverted male ones (people were dumb as hell back then--I would google you a link but my stomach is not up for the results "inside out victorian genitals" will bring right now)--and instead of macho, crushing riffitude our priorities became this. Really, all the good alt-rock bands had that thing they replaced their fore-overbearer's primal and oft-putrid* "maleness" with--e.g. Nirvana's nhilistic roar, My Bloody Valentine's vocal-masking washes of distortion, Garbage's, uh, sexiness--but Shudder To Think's was one of the weirdest. For once deconstruction is an actually apt term; it sounds like they disassembled a rock song into its constituent pieces, strew them across the floor, and then duct-taped them back together with no rhyme or reason into some horrific monstrosity that just barely works, Sid-style.
It is the this of rock songs
Here comes a part of a riff! Oh wait there's a downbeat! What the fuck it's a vocal! All just coming and going at wrongly timed intervals, the result of too small gears connected to too long pinions... or something. Throw in the seriously homoerotic video, and guitarist Christian Bale's** at first fairly straightforward sounding guitar solo made utterly weird by context until it evolves into a little buzzsaw of noise itself, and the next time you hear a normal song you'll wonder--just what the fuck is really going on under there anyway?
*seriously fuck that song
**2:15 in the video. AND YOU THOUGHT I WAS JOKING
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