UNBELIEVABLY Unforgotten Albums #2 Lubricated Goat
Plays The Devil's Music - 1987
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By Danger Coolidge. (Black Eye)
n November '88 Lubricated Goat made an appearance on Andrew Denton's ABC TV show Blah Blah Blah miming to “In The Raw” from their second record, Paddock of Love. Fittingly, they were stark-raving naked. The uproar this flagrant exhibitionism caused is now the subject of a documentary, also called In The Raw, which is currently in the process of seeking additional funding to complete post-production. If and when the film surfaces I hope it rightly paints Lubricated Goat as the phenomenal band they were, not just a one-off publicity stunt. With a name like Lubricated Goat it's easy to argue that they never wanted to be taken seriously, but one listen to this seriously demented and debauched bunch of rock 'n' roll guttersnipes and you'll concur the outrageous moniker is nothing if not apt. Like the name, the sound invokes wild reactions in all who lay ears on it. Once you hear Lubricated Goat you can never go back. The songs won't necessarily be stuck in your head, but the overall feeling will haunt you, like the smell of a family pet scraped off the highway and brought home to be buried in the backyard. Trouble is, more people have seen footage of them playing an average song naked on TV than have heard their records. While the Blah Blah Blah appearance is perfect for illustrating the complete detachment of Lubricated Goat from the rest of normal society, it is, in actual fact, quite boring. The impact of seeing them disrobed lasts about half the song - you might get a laugh or two out of seeing rock stars trying to look cool with their limp cocks flapping about - but before long the repetition of the track's only riff starts to grate and it's lights out. Repeated viewings are a chore. “In The Raw” is such a tedious song. If Lubricated Goat should be remembered for one thing, it's their astonishing debut LP, Plays The Devil's Music. “Our music is music for people to perform obscene sex acts to and to put on even when they're having normal sex,” leader Stu Spasm (real name Stuart Gray) told B-Side Magazine in 1988, just prior to the release of Paddock of Love. “[It's] music for impressionable teenagers to kill themselves to. It's much removed from just playing for people to have a bit of a dance or whatever, even though we have really strong rhythms. The actual sounds we make are intended to create atmospheres. The lyrics sort of create the atmosphere and the music swoops and swirls...” With Lubricated Goat, Spasm had stripped rock 'n' roll of its dignity, dosed it up on unmanageable amounts of psychedelics, barbiturates and amphetamines, then dragged it unmercifully though hellish quagmires of multi-coloured excrement. Like the Blah Blah Blah incident, Plays The Devil's Music is raw, unfettered and perverse, but unlike that showing, it's thrillingly inspired and not the least bit contrived. It's what rock 'n' roll, or punk rock, is always striving to be - fearless, confronting, emotional, interesting, dangerous, visceral, unique, and utterly preposterous. Issued in July 1987 by Red Eye Records owner John Foy, Plays The Devil's Music was among the first batch of releases for Foy's offshoot Black Eye label, the others being the compilation album Waste Sausage and Thug's Mechanical Ape/Proud Idiots Parade (as well as Thug's “Fuck Your Dad” 7” single).
Recorded in September 1986 in two separate sessions, Side One was done in Perth by a three-piece line up consisting of former Zulu Rattle, Salamander Jim, Singing Dog and Beasts of Bourbon member Spasm (guitar, vocals, bass, synths), backed by ex-Kyrptonics duo Peter Hartley (guitar, bass) and Brett Ford (drums). Side Two is comprised of mostly lyric-less recordings made by Spasm and (future Monkeywrench and Bloodloss) drummer Martin Bland in the living room of Bland's place in Adelaide. Of two killer sides, Side One does the most damage.
Kicking off with the skittish, hypnotic and hilarious “Jason The Unpopular”, it lurches into the otherworldly “Beyond The Grave”, a herking, jerking, drunken, fuzzed-out nightmare about a guy who haunts the lover who murdered him. Fast-paced and muffled psych-beat track “Guttersnipe” leads into my personal favourite, “Nerve Quake”, a crude and decrepit psychedelic stormer with a surreal sci-fi lyric that typifies Spasm's acute sense of the absurd and suits the crooked and mangled sound perfectly. “Evil prying microscope, All across this alien thoughtscape / Vultures circling overhead, signal now it's time for a lunchbreak / Yeah though your walkin' through the valley of the shadow of death, like you own the place / You'll bend, you'll start to shake… Nerve Quake!” Side One closes with the darkly kitsch, “Anal Injury”, which sounds like a fully-Mandraxed Jimi Hendrix trying
to poke fun at the Inspector Gadget theme accompanied by a chorus of convulsing epileptics playing balloons to simulate sphincter tears. It would be almost cartoon, if it weren't so gritty and fucking evil. Sweeping you up in a slightly different putridsmelling gust of noise, Side Two is like demented carnival music, or perverted punk rock swing recorded in someone's bedroom on a cocktail of over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and played back through a busted speaker. Less structured than Side One, more experimental and almost entirely instrumental, Side Two is equivalent to being forced to endure a series of hellish theme park rides designed by HG Lewis. Whereas every song except “Anal Injury” on the first side had lyrics, on the second only closer “Can't Believe I'm Really Making Love” has any. And even then there's only three lines, and one of them is, “Feel my penis burning inside you baby.” “Hornraiser” is like an out-ofcontrol orgy dominated by a distorted toy saxophone that sounds like it was simulated on a Casio-keyboard somebody had salvaged from the rubbish tip. “Frotting With Ennio” is like Devo got hammered and wrote the score to a bestiality film. With its big band jazz swing, finger-clicks and all, “Goats and the Men Who Ride Them” doesn't quite live up to the brilliance of its title. While the stab at wah wah-induced sleaze, “Can't Believe I'm Really Making Love”, sounds like a crappy Barry White pisstake with backing by the Residents. It's an end that admittedly cannot hold a candle to its beginning, but consistency and complete insanity never did make comfortable bedfellows. It's almost unthinkable that a band a precariously balanced musically, socially and mentally as Lubricated Goat could hope to make even one more good record, but a line-up of Spasm, Hartley, Ford and (current Mudhoney bassplayer) Guy Maddison returned a year later with a second deplorable masterpiece, Paddock of Love. After that the band began to splinter apart, and, though Spasm kept the name alive, the junkie jams he and assorted cohorts churned out don't match this here devil's music.
UNBELIEVABLY BAD
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