In my younger days I was a bit of a label whore. Still am come to think of it. One of the labels I followed was the Texas label Trance Syndicate. Run by King Coffey of the Butthole Surfers, Trance Syndicate was the  home of a delightful bunch of miscreants such as Crunt, Crust, Pain Teens, …And You Wil Know Us By The Trail Of the Dead and this bunch of acid drenched punks, Ed Hall. I actually forgot that I owned this until I did a bit of a trawl through my CD’s over the weekend and suffice to say, I had not played  it in years. To my rapidly fading hearing Ed Hall sound to me like Primus combined with the Butthole Surfers with a liberal dose of Jesus Lizard. Gloryhole was the third record they released and probably the first great record they produced. The other Ed Hall record I’ve heard is worthwhile tracking down is Motherscratcher and if I offload some stuff on ebay then I might just pick it up. The thing about Ed Hall is that their sense of humour sometimes disguised the fact that they could really play (check out the video at the end).

I actually remember buying Gloryhole in a record store in Canberra when I was visiting my sister around the time it was released. I remember the press at the time was pretty indifferent to Ed Hall and the  other Trance Syndicate bands. I suppose it was the era of Sonic Youth, Nirvana and the mainstreaming of alternative music and bands such as Ed Hall were perhaps a little too  weird even for a world that allowed the Melvins  to be signed to a major label. It is great stuff and it has me all nostlgic to see what else I can uncover in my CD stash. I’m pretty sure I still have that Crunt record and an awful record by Crust. I think the Pain Teens record is long gone but Trail of the Dead’s fantastic debut is till floating around somewhere. Sadly Gloryhole is out of print (Trance Syndicate folded in 1999) but second hand copies turn up on ebay and amazon pretty regularly.

Live in 1992

I first started getting interested in alternative music in the mid-1980′s. My over-arching memory of that time were the glowing reviews that three particular US  hardcore bands received in the  sadly defunct RAM weekly music rag. RAM was Australia’s version of NME but with better writing and less of a bandwagon jumping  habit which pre-internets was the only reasonable way of getting info on the current state of play in the US and UK. I still have RAM’s  reviews in a scrap book of the w first three hardcore albums I bought, Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, Killdozer’s 12 Point Buck and Butthole Surfers Hairway to Steven. Since those formative years I’ve managed to get hold of the entirety of the Sonic Youth and Killdozer back catalogue but for some reason only treated myself to my second Butthole Surfers record (namely this one) recently.  I have no idea why it took me so long (19 years for fucks sake) between geting my first and second Butthole Surfers record. Perhaps I found Hairway To Steven  too “out there” and was strangely intimatidated in some way. Perhaps it was the fact that every shitty record they released in the 1990′s that I’d heard made me hate them more and more. 

For whatever reason I had for steering clear of Butthole Surfers for all those years  I’m glad that I dabbled again. Locust Abortion Technician is I think  a better album than Hairway to Steven. On Locust Abortion Technician the band manage to plunder the fertile grounds of psychedelic rock, US Hardcore, Punk, Folk, Indian Bollywood, tape effects, alt-rock and Black Sabbath to create an ACID drenched freakfest of juvenile toilet  humour crushed together with the harrowing nightmares of a very, very bad acid trip. In fact considering the amount of drugs these guys consumed, it’s a wonder they ever made it into the studio. In fact given the  fact that they lived in Texas for the majority of their career how they didn’t end up in jail is also a mystery.

If you’re new to Butthole Surfers then this is a pretty good pace to start.  Steer clear of everything they did after 1988 except for the  Widowermaker EP which is actually very, very good.