Get Your Greasy Head Off the Sham

Album Review

From the band name to the album title and the disquieting cover photo, Breast Fed Yak seems to be all about the ugliness. And there's plenty of that to be had here; the opening track, "F***h Space Scan," sounds like three different Butthole Surfers outtakes played on top of each other. In their day job in the cult favorites Controlled Bleeding, Paul Lemos and Joe Papa have evinced an occasional taste for delicacy, but throughout this side project, which was created with an edict that no electronic instruments would be used at all, there's an anarchic, almost frenzied quality that's more akin to the most unhinged moments of drummer Yoshida Tatsuya's primary band, the free noise Ruins. Even a cover of "Bo Diddley" is devolved into untrammeled noise, and pieces like "Exorcising Demons from the Hempstead Bus Depot" take the primal, untutored spirit of early Red Krayola or the most experimental ESP-Disk bands (note Ferrucci Frankie's untutored, shrieking clarinet and Håkan Almkvist's boinging sitar) and turn it into something altogether more unsettling. "Liking" an album like this is almost beside the point, but as far as noise rock freakery goes, Get Your Greasy Head Off the Sham is about as noisy and freaky as it gets.