White Shit – Sculpted Beef – Post Present Medium [Album As Art #93]

I’ll say this for myself: I find a way to like people.

For example, I’m not a huge fan of Big Business. Nothing personal; they just don’t do it for me (and I loooove me some Karp, strangely). Then they backed The Melvins on a tour and I HAD to at least give them props for bolstering King Buzzo and Dale Crover with extra punch, but still I found something missing from their albums.

Then I saw White Shit‘s Sculpted Beef in a record store the other day and took a chance because the cover is probably the funniest I’ve seen since, oh, one of the Nofx jackets … Anyway, turns out I like this. A lot.

This isn’t actually a Big Business-conceived outing — Wrangler Brutes/Monorchid/Skull Kontrol mastermind Andy Coronado — but when I hear Jared Warren sing I think Big Business and that’s all there is to it, so we’ll go forward with that weighing heavily on our minds, or something …

Anyhoo, I’m hearing a lot of interesting wrinkles in these songs, up to and including:

• Hot, molten-metal guitar leads like the ones you’ll find bunkered deep in Tank records;
• Poison Idea-style punk-ish madness;
• screeching hardcore circa early AFI or Biohazard;
• some Dead Low Tide-esque surrealist freak-rock;
• math-y passages that remind me of no band in particular;

And so on, so forth and so whathefuck, this is a fucking-great record that once again justifies my theory: If the cover art is good you’ve got about 74 percent odds of snagging a winner no matter — or maybe because of — how old, obscure or weird it is.

The grand trend of gay cover art/lyrics/band names/labels in indie-rock — Pansy Division, Roddy Bottum, Hidden Cameras,Gay Tastee, Art Fag Records, Fag Tapes — continues unabated, and I must say, every time I see gayness of any sort — or female nudity, my preference — on the jacket I know I’ve got a winner!