October 10, 2009

Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel
Hole-1984

I received an e-mail from Mr. JG Thirwell himself the other day politely asking me to take down the link to download this album. I have replaced the links with one that leads to Some Bizarre's site. They remastered and released this album in 2006. Please go purchase it from them. I know I will be. That being said, my original write up is below. Also, you can listen to a great Thirlwell interview on WFMU's Strength Through Failure here.


I originally didn't want to post this record due to J.G. Thirlwell's plea in the linear notes of his new releases to 'please respect the artists by not uploading this music to P2P services and blogs.', but after digging through his website (foetus.org) and seeing that this is one of his releases not available for download from him, I decided to put it up. Another factor was the amount of excitement I got from finding his Wiseblood work posted on Rocket Remnant's blog. As soon as Mr. Thirlwell offers this record it will be pulled down and replaced with a link to purchase it from him. In the meantime get ready for an adventure...

Today I am offering J.G. Thirlwell's 3rd LP, Hole. As with (almost) all of his releases, It's not distributed as a Thirlwell record. This one is credited to 'Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel', but this whole project, releases like 'You've Got Foetus On your Breath', 'The Foetus Symphony Orchestra' and 'Foetus Under Glass', have come to be referred to as simply 'Foetus'. Thirlwell, himself, starts naming them just 'Foetus' with 1995's Gash. Getting the names straight is the easy part, describing the beautiful, playful, violent, chaotic mess that is recorded here is not so simple.

Foetus feels most at home in that space between genres, without seeming like he's hopping styles just to impress the listener (see Mike Patton). He seems to exist somewhere between The Birthday Party and Raymond Scott, which comes off as a sort of stripped-down, twisted Oingo Boingo; picture Danny Elfman standing naked in front of a fun-house mirror (gross). Where there are hints of juvenile punk-rock around the edges, there are also traces of complex orchestrations as well. We hit Surf, Industrial, Metal, Punk, Neoclassical, Big-Band, Gothic and Electro-Whatever on this warped odyssey through a 24 year old Thirlwell's brain, not bad for only his 3rd album.

It's hard to pin down what Thirwell's output sounds like so it's tough to decide if this is a good representation for the uninitiated. There are a few things present on this record that do exemplify Thirwell's Foetus output. For instance, his usage of the studio as it's own instrument, the artwork's red, black and white color scheme and themes of violence, misanthropy, murder, mutilation, incest, abuse, failure, masochism and machoism all served up with a side of his southern-gothic, black humor. The taboos that Foetus survives on are the ones that Danny Elfman and Trent Reznor have nightmares about.

So download and enjoy!


Track listing:
Side A:
1. Clothes Hoist
2. Lust For Death
3. I'll Meet You In Poland, Baby
4. Hot Horse
5. Sick Man

Side B:
1. Street Of Shame
2. Satan Place
3. White Knuckles
4. Water Torture
5. Cold Day In Hell



Purchase from 'Some Bizarre'

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