Osaka's Satanicpornocultshop has been described as a hip-hop band due to their cut-and-paste aesthetic, but one wonders if even that famously elastic genre has enough room to accommodate the absolutely gleeful musical abandon that surfaces on their sixth album, "Anorexia Gas Balloon."
The first cut, a haunting cover of the Velvet Underground's "Candy Says," is a cinematic drone with hazy vocals and a haunting children's chorus. Its quiet gentleness, however, is a ruse. On the second track, stuttering beats kick in over samples of hardcore bands, Taiwanese film soundtracks and electronic noise coalescing into barely contained chaos. Allegedly a cover of King Missile's "Detachable Penis," the only remnant of the song is the flat voice chanting the title like a punch-line. It is, luckily, a tremendously amusing joke, and the rest of the album follows the same pattern. The other cuts are also "covers" (sometimes even covers of covers, as in the case of Lydia Lunch's version of Lee Hazelwood's "Some Velvet Morning), but in reality they are more dismemberments with bits of songs and rhythms pasted together into freakishly groovy musical Frankensteins. Hip-hop? Why not?
