Alien Sex Fiend, Acid Bath

After spending nearly two hours trying to beat the Silo level of "Goldeneye" on the highest difficultly setting (damn Russkies), I'm finally sitting down to review "Acid Bath". "Hmm," you say, "playing a game from your high school years on a console that's as dead as ten-day old Texas roadkill and listening to the second album by a band old enough to be your parents despite your perverse crush on their keyboard player? Having a retro weekend or are you turning into one of those annoying 'backinaday' old-skool hipsters who don't leave home anymore because they still haven't got a hold on the new bus routes that were implemented two years ago? You're pathetic."

Firstly, fuck you. Secondly, no, and here's why. When I was growing up, I felt little to no connection to the music that the media tried to present as belonging to me or my "generation". I can appreciate the importance of Nirvana's breakthrough because of the musical landscape at the time it happened, but they've never been more than just a band to me. A pretty good band, yes, but certainly not the soundtrack to my whiny teenage angst. Ditto Smashing Pumpkins, Tool, Tupac, or any other lionized artists of the time. I'm seriously having a hard time coming up with any other names, because I just didn't seem to be listening to the same thing as my classmates. I'm not trying to turn this into an "I was listening to wicked cool underground music way before anyone else my age" type rant, because, in a word, I wasn't. I was listening to The Cure, the Ramones, U2, and Roxette. Hardly the soundtrack to the life of a music snob in the mid 90's. Where the hell am I going with this? The point is this: people who develop an attachment to what they perceive as "their" music, regardless of whether that music was on MTV or being played in seedy downtown dives by highly acclaimed screamo bands, typically seem unable to maintain an open ear towards anything new (mainstream, underground or otherwise), and often can't stray too far from safe and established paths as far as earlier music goes. Otherwise intelligent people decide that "their" music was somehow the apogee of musical history, that anything new is only the faint echo of greatness. The jock whose life peaked with "The Chronic" and forced blowjobs from cheerleaders in '92, his senior year, ends up a used car salesman, confused and resenting his own children as they approach the glory he once lived out. The passionate punk rocker who sees his own revolution and lifeblood being bought and sold by major labels ends up bitter and despising any music released after 1977 (paradoxically he hates music that ignores the legacy of punk because it was exactly the sort of tripe "we were fighting against", while any music that acknowledges punk is merely a pale and bastardized imitation in his eyes), and is left to lick his wounds, listening to Sun Ra and Miles Davis records (nothing wrong with them, but dead people aren't the only ones that make good music).

In sum: don't get too attached to whatever you're listening to when you fall in love with music, or else you'll miss out on the sublime pleasure of seeing an amazing young band knocking the smirks off the faces of the people who come to check out their first tour, as well as the more simple pleasures of listening to earlier music that you might've otherwise missed, like "Acid Bath", a masterfully constructed, swaggering album put out by Alien Sex Fiend just as they were finding out just how much freedom their madness affords them. Cheers.

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