Customer Reviews

Locust Abortion Technician

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

How to say it?
The Butthole Surfers' music is sacred to me. I look at their first four albums as works of art. The most transcendentally wigged-out rock and roll music ever recorded. Period.

And Locust Abortion is the creme de la creme of the Surfers music. A short but bursting to the brim sonic sponge bath carefully engineered to hit you where it hurts.

I go back and forth over which track is my favorite. Both versions of "Graveyard" are gleaming sinister perfection. I decided a few months ago that the version played at regular speed is the greatest song ever recorded (it's between "Whirling Hall of Knives", "Edgar", and "Jimi" - Surfer fans should know them all).

Pittsburgh to Lebanon is the sludge that life is made from. Total beauty. The hollow moans at the end are actually quite lovely.

A word about the slowed down version of "Graveyard". You should probably listen to the songs in order, so you hear "Sweat Loaf" before "Graveyard". "Sweat Loaf" basically primes your head for the drop into "Graveyard". (whoever said that listening to the Surfers was like taking drugs was NOT lying. It really is).

Other great songs: "Kuntz" . I could listen to this again and again (and I do). "22 going on 23" is another free-floating dangerous masterpiece that will even out your mind.

I have this CD in my car always and usually listen to it at least once every couple of days. Sometimes it won't leave my CD player for days at a time. I love it.

Now, a quick word of warning. If you have never listened to this CD (or any Surfers' CD) be careful (heh-heh). You may want to start with one of their easier albums like Psychic Powerless. If you listen to this album first, it could freak your head out a little (course you wouldn't listen to it in the first place if you didn't enjoy that sort of thing from time to time) - I KNOW I do.

Have fun. disappear. Fall in. Embrace. This is it.

to be submersed in the dark oozing subliminal world of cigarette smoking beligerent clowns. Perhaps you have no desire to intertwine your consciousness with the liquid of insanity. Maybe you can't handle the denizen's of your mind frolicking about in the real world. Don't listen if any of these apply to you. You're better off, trust me. This is the soundtrack to the twisted world you know exists, but no one ever talks to you about.

Because it can warp and twist your mind like no other music can. First there's the cover art...two blissful clowns playing with a cute dog. Nothing could possibly be more misleading. But turn to the reverse side and you'll see a photograph of a baby that looks like he has Down's syndrome. And we're off to Locust Abortion Technician!!!

Easily one of the most bizarre, nightmarish, acid-drenched albums ever to bubble up from the gutter, Locust Abortion Technician will make you redefine the meaning of "wierd." This is the Butthole Surfer's best and most avant-garde album, filled with tapeloops, slowed/sped-up/reversed vocals and sfx, sludgey distortion and chaotic song structure. It is a crazy, schizophrenic mess that will get inside your head. I love it.

The Butthole Surfers prove to be masters of the studio, as they create "music" that you would think spilled out of an insane asylum from a freaky netherworld. This is THE album to play if you want to freak out or disturb all people within listening range.

Sweet Loaf: 10/10 - Variation of Black Sabbath's Sweet Leaf. Goes on for about 8 minutes. A bit repetitive, but still cool.
Graveyard: 10/10 - A sludgey, distorted song that sounds like it was recorded under 10 feet of dirt. Slowed-down lyrics accompany Leary's choking guitar.
Pittsburgh to Lebanon: 8/10 - Blues, Butthole style.
Weber: 3/10 - This song seems like a fragment of a different song. Its only 35 seconds, and is the only useless song on the album.
Hay: 10/10 - Now this song is scary. People screaming HAY in the background while rapidly reversed sound effects and scratching overlap. Very, very, freaky.
Human Cannonball: 8/10 - The most "normal" song here. You can actually understand the lyrics, and it has a followable structure. Sounds like late 70's punk.
U.S.S.A: 8/10 - Distorted, whining guitars, high-pitched sceaming.
O-Men: 10/10 - Gibby making Tasmanian Devil noises as a thrashing guitar and drums play. Also features disembodied high-pitched vocals, slowed-down segments, clanging and clashing sounds effects. Very noisy.
Kuntz: 10/10 - Probably the strangest song I've ever heard, even more so than anything by Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. The Surfers take an old Thai song and mess around with it. They use multiple layers of tapeloops, slow-motion and fast-motion to create a truly pyschadelic mess.
Graveyard 2: 9/10 - Different version of Graveyard 1.
22 going on 23: 10/10 - One of the best songs on the album. A radio show involving a female talking about how she was sexually assualted plays in the background as the Sufers play music that sounds straight out of hell. The words "medicine," "guilt," "anxiety," "I cannot sleep," and "depression" echo and repeat over and over in the background. The albums ends with cows mooing away in a field, along with crickets chirping.

I'm sure that a lot of people have heard of synchronizing Pink Floyd's "Dark side of the moon" with "The wizard of oz", right?
Well I wonder if this album would synchronize with the texas chainsaw massacre (the original), because the two seem very similar to one another.

That's just an idea that I just had.
Now I invite somebody to take a lot of acid, and sit in the dark alone watching "the texas chainsaw massacre" with the TV muted and this album playing on repeat. I want to know if you make it out alive.

OK, you want a song-by-song analysis? Here goes: "Sweat Loaf", opening with a classic gag, is a twisted but fun cover of Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf". "Graveyard", or "Graveyard version one", is a mopey distortion-fest, with Gibby's vocals dragging along. "Pittsburgh To Lebanon" is a good song for driving. "Weber" is a 45 second guitar-n-drums piece. "Hey" is the last song played backwards, with random "HEY!"'s thrown in. "Human Cannonball" is a twisted 60's style piece. "USSA" is almost industrial with its chuggachugga rhythms and screamed vocals. "The O-Men" (my favorite!) is a fast and scary song, with Gibby doing a Tasmanian Devil voice. Really! He doesn't sing, he makes Taz noises! "Kuntz" is an obscene song sung in Chinese (I think). "Graveyard version two" is essentially the first "Graveyard played faster. Finally, the moment we've been waiting for: "22 Going on 23"! Opening with a disturbing radio conversation, this piece lurches, whines, and rumbles form the depths of hell. If you like ELECTRICLARRYLAND-type Surfers, GO AWAY! However, if you like dark experimentation, buy this album! It's worth every cent!

as you are beaten down by the psychotic acid influenced weirdness of the buttholes at their finest. This release throws you down into the basement of LSD hell, and locks the door. Track by track, you understand that this is a dark journey into the realm of all things scary. Experimental and intense, this album is a must have.

Reviewer A. Taeger has the right idea... but I chose David Lynch's film "Erasurehead" to watch using this masterpiece by BHS turned up as the soundtrack. I once read a review of "Erasurehead" in a book that said that you probably wouldn't be comfortable around anyone who can watch that movie all the way through. The same holds true for this CD, but if the amount of reviews of Locust Aboration Technician are any indication, there are a lot of us out there. So sit down, turn up this CD, and have a blotter and SlimFast milkshake. Hey, let's have a singalong to "Kuntz"!
(and by the way, the Erasurehead soundtrack is cool too)

Holy cow (might be a pun), this one just takes the cake. I remember seeing them on tour for this album at the Maceba Theater in Houston, TX and I have NEVER been the same. This album represents them at their most experimental and...well, dirty. I mean filthy. My favorite by far.

I'm Serious; you don't even need drugs to hallucinate to this thing. When you first get this thing, listen to it in a dark, in a closet. Random things will pop into your head. What happened to me? I was falling down a jagged hole; I saw people and cows being slaughtered/tortured; People trapped in a well; Old Nazi marching footage; my skin crawling off, Horror Movie clips, my Fingers Growing. I can promise you that you shall receive many trips if you listen to this 30+ minute CD. Pittsburg to Lebanon is like A country song from hell. Hay is really cool to hear backwards or forwards. And the solo in 22 going on 23 leaves me in a trance where everything is perfect. Buy this CD today.

Locust Abortion Technician, the Surfers' 3rd album, is definately the pinnacle of their acid-drenched craziness we all love, and miss. The album cover, a painting of happy clowns and a dressed-up clown dog, is about as misleading as you can get....until you look at the back cover, which is a photo of a baby that looks like it has Down's syndrome. Twisted stuff, for sure.
Every song on this rather-short album (only about a half hour) is weird to the max, in its own way. Highlights include: the stomping high-speed rocker "Human Cannonball" (the ONLY song with somewhat-normal Gibby vocals); "The O-Men", which is Gibby ranting away with Tasmanian Devil noises; the wildly bizaare "Kuntz" which is a song sung in some foreign eastern langauge, which tape-loops at a certain dirty-sounding lyric (guess which one); and the disturbing "22 Going On 23" which is a hard rock jam over a radio conversation, involving somebody (hard to tell if it's a man or woman) talking about how he/she was assaulted sexually. It's hard to tell if it's a real-life sample or the Surfers themselves providing the voices.
Priceless stuff, which the music world just wasn't ready for, in 1987. It was the first Surfers album I bought and made me an instant fan, after one listen. Due to the short running time, it would have been great, if Latino Bugger Veil added the songs from the vinyl-only "Brown Reason To Live" on the end of the CD. Let's bow our heads and pray that it one day gets re-released on CD, sending all the Electriclarrylands and Weird Revolutions into the bargin bin.