Do The Headless Chicken(s)

Pop Lib is the one I liked (and the only one I ever heard.) Here's what I said I liked about it in a Voice review at the time: "Two women and four men playing borrowed instruments they haven't learned yet. The sextet's got a bona fide kidlike kidding quality, and seems happy just to be speaking through their incompetence to make us understand why love gets them twisted. Mistakes don't matter, and the soundmix is horrible (therefore awesome) -- three times in the first track there's this dense electronic buzz that sounds like a fan accidentally switched on, or a fuse blew; nowhere are the players and/or vocals entirely in sync. Lindsay Maitland honks French horn like Lora Logic blew sax, just exhaling every which way 'til a sound comes out that means something to him. Everything's carried along on a simple drum-tap and a two-note bassline or Casiotone-riff; George Henderson's rhythm guitar, apparently untuned, computes Mobius-strip equations. But there's shape and structure, drifting off like supernal marshmallows, tensing up with microcosmic repetition, erupting into absolute, uncontrolled wrath." (Whatever the heck all that means. I went on to compare the song "Spaceship #9" to Amon Duul and "Junk", to the Velvet Undeground's "Heroin" by way of "My Girl," which are quoted in its lyrics.)

Weirdly, here's what I write earlier in the piece: "This was all set to be a review of Headless Chickens, by New Zealanders of the same name: trumped-up gargoyle-gurgle, solidly conistent, like if the Buttholes' Another Man's Sac was 'pop' instead of 'rock.'" I say it was one of my most-played albums of 1987, but I apparently got fed up by what hit me as "willful weirdness." I never explain what made their weirdness seem so willful.