REVIEWS

Caustic
Booze Up and Riot

Crunch Pod

Posted: Sunday, July 08, 2007
By: Matthew Johnson
Assistant Editor

Milwaukee's Matt Fanale is back with more power noise and bad attitude. For the most part, this is gloriously low-brow stuff; with track titles like "All Your Heroes are Dildos" and "Industrial Moustache Ride" how could it be anything else? You want straightforward power noise, you can get that anywhere, but Caustic's best weapon is the comedy hook, whether it's the samples from vintage sex education filmstrips on "Dog Dick Ugly" or the raunchy sampled repartee on the brilliantly titled "The Reason I Broke Up with You is a Million Reasons You Psychotic Wang." At times though, Fanale's compositions fail to live up to their full comedic potential. With a title as rich as "Kill AFI (They Started It)," for example, you'd expect some better material than a looped sample of the phrase "Fucking cocksuckers," and though the song is a fun piece of club stomp, it could've been so much more. A pleasant surprise is Fanale's occasional vocal appearances, a rarity in the power noise scene. Title track "Booze Up and Riot" is a drunken punk rock rebel song set to a crunchy drum machine, while "Mutilate (You'll Stomp to Anything)" features some nice reverb-drenched screams. If Booze Up and Riot isn't high art, it certainly isn't intended to be, as evidenced by the numerous self-deprecating references (at one point, a little girl calls Fanale a "punk-ass bitch"), and it certainly accomplishes what it sets out to do. If you want your music drunk, ugly, and kind of dumb... well, you're probably already a Caustic fan, but just in case you're not, get yourself a copy of this CD already. What are you waiting for?