Review: Reagan's Polyp - America Needs More Ass

I get the same sensation when listening to Ween. I can see the recording booth in my mind: a microphone jutting out from among a mountain of unwashed clothes, Frankenstein taxidermy, Crass records and disturbing crayon sketches. America Needs More Ass is the sound of lunacy festering in lunacy – an irreparable descent into juvenile humour and vitamin D deficiency – but strip back to the barked vocal tag-team and the galloping drum machine, and there’s a punk record in here; an exasperated cathartic protest, slotting the substance of its complaint within the woolly sock of innuendo and shit jokes.

So what else do we have here? The aimless dissonance of cats atop church organs, guitars coiled into wacky springs, 70s sci-fi electronics mashed into lullaby, trapdoors of utter rhythmic meltdown. It’s important not to take this as an inference that Reagan’s Polyp are inept (although that’s certainly the illusion they’re selling). To invert the observation of a punk record sheathed by puerility, there is a scent of musique concrete if one blots out the punk pacing; a mesh of place and origin that balances somewhere between unquestioned impulse and particular stereo placement. No clearer does this become than on “54-40 Or Fuck!”, which wriggles out from the album’s 2-minute confines to tumble into noise abstraction akin to Russell Haswell or Tod Dockstader. Very crafty.