kidneythieves - zerospace

Run motherfucker, run...out and buy this album! You know, you can't judge many things on visual representation alone... Food, pencils, penguins... and bands. Because you can have a really cool video (Xibit) that makes your music look better, or you can make a crap video (kidneythieves) that makes your music sound worse. Or you can be Tool, but that's a whole other area. But the kidneythieves, right? They're good, they're rough, they're aggressive, and they're in stores now. Totally. We've got a femme fatale singer (the poision fetish Free Dominguiez) with a super voice, about as syrupy as an oil slick and about 3/4ths as sweet, whose barbed lyrics against the spiky backdrop of the band form an unbreakable steel door that hearkens back to the good old days of Skinny Puppy with a touch more madness. It's a hallucinatory album, filled with turns not necessarily unexpected but fruitful in their exploration. I have heard like "it", but I haven't heard "it" ever before. What is it? Well, Mike Patton once asked the same question in a little band known as Faith No More, and Mr. Patton also is known to shriek like an electrocuted wombat into microphones with strange urgency- And that's what "it" is: The urgency of humanity that the kidneythieves try to convey...and almost succeed. That's the only pratfall of Zerospace: The almost part. There's a bit of overproduction, a bit of a bad cover (Patsy Cline's "Crazy" sucks in this setting) and an ounce or so of exaggerated badarse-ness mixed in here. "Serene Dream" and "Dyskrasia" are super tracks layered in mayhem and existensial lyrics, and the title track is overall the most outstanding in terms of articulate chaos. "Glitter Girl" kicks theStart's butt in terms of adulation, and my favorite track is "Black Bullet", which is Nine Inch Nails-ey in a way that only Pretty Hate Machine could have been, trouncing the music with "when i'm walking on the line/i am/when i think that i could kill, i am/ when i think that i am love, i am/i am a black bullet" doing more for the female psyche than any artist of late. It's a strong album deserving of major props and adulation. [www.kidneythieves.com]