The Necessary Evils - The Sicko Inside Me

 

I kind of lost touch with my old pal Steve Pallow after the Beguiled broke up, and now that he has sadly passed away way too young, I am looking into some of his post-Beguiled work. This particular release I received courtesy of my pal, Rob - thanks buddy!

The NE's basically sound like a more extreme take on the Beguiled, with a bit less R'n'B and a bit more trash thrown in, with an over abundance of over-the-top fuzz, feedback, vibrato and shrieks from the underworld tempered by some occasional Farfisa-ish keyboards. The opening "Love Handles", Alcohol" and Man from Mars" are fairly crazed, but not everything is breakneck speed, as with "Get It Out Of My Brain", which is Cramps-ian/Exotica-ish, but "Glory Hole" (classy!) is beyond trash - it is basically a fuzzed-out garbage disposal of a song - not that that's a bad thing! "Halle Bop" is more of a mid-tempo stomp, but certainly no less noisy, "Play With Fire" is pure growl'n'fuzz, "Girl" is kind of a low-fi, wall of noize, garage-y take on Devo's "Mongoloid" mixed with the Music Machine, of all things! Low fi thrash is an understatement for "Butcher's Floor" while "Brainwasher" is another fuzz'n'shrieker with some hints of the Cramps, "Drag Pow Wow Drag" sounds like Thee Milkshakes run through a cement mixer, "The Gypsy Plays His Drums" I suppose is the Seeds' song, although you would never know it, and the proceedings come to a chaotic end with "An Accidental Does of Gamma Radiation", which is literally just noise - again, not that I have anything against that!

There definitely was a trend in the late 90's of low-fi, super-trashy garage-punk bands that I think I overlooked for the most part at the time, as I was in a somewhat different trip at the time, but for lovers of noise/trash, this is the place to go!