Moth Drakula. Redondo Beach.

The record claims the Moth Drakula arose from the sands of Redondo Beach. The flyer on my refrigerator says Gardena. Wikipedia tells me that Redondo Beach also spewed the insipid Jack Black out of its cultural graveyard, but also the completely unassailable Black Flag (yes, completely), and that Hollywood invasions have been staged by the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean film and, holy shit, the first BATMAN movie! If I’m reading this record correctly, the Redondans more importantly know how to mount one hell of a gang fight, and will be waiting with chains and field telephones when Mr. Black brings his Hollywood entourage back home to teach everyone about Led Fucking Zeppelin.

I’m sure this is the part where I’m supposed to talk about how it sounds like their megaton distortion blasts threaten to once again sink that Great Tourist Magnet, The Endless Pier, into the indifferent waves of the mighty Pacific, how its heavy violence will paint your walls with your pia mater and grind all your cerebral bourgeois musical concepts into a fine paste bound for processing into hog feed to plop into some Iowa feeding station. Make no mistake, this is some heavy stuff - from the first strangled death of an innocent little chord to the final heavenly Burzum keyboard outro, they’re letting you know they’re ready to fight! Ready to fight! Ready to fight! fight fight fight fight!

But even if we’re ready to lay down our soul to the gods Rock and Roll, who sees the light and who’s still in darkness and night? When the noisy rapture comes, who’s here and who’s not? This isn’t a piece that’s going to win over a lot of converts, and it certainly doesn’t give a shit whether your name’s written in the Book. Stable sonic platforms stay around only until they get clobbered by a thuggish twist of a knob or get completely yanked away revealing the faint screaming of buried synths, and maybe of actual vocals.

This denial forces a choice on the listener: either surrender to the pleasures of confinement within the walls rising out of their machines or violently reject them. Unlike, say, an older variant of noise whose underlying idiot savant ideology you could imagine being appreciated (if not liked) in a freshman humanities discussion section, you either get this or you don’t. But either way, you will respond according to Moth Drakula’s rules. This is rock and roll, straight from the hip, waiting to fend off any stray consumer accidentally crossing into the wrong turf. That icon of middle class punk rock individualism, Greg Ginn, should be proud of his neighbors.

Incidentally, the title of this piece – In Heaven Everything is … Fine, aka Henry Spencer vs. the Radiator Lady – coyly alludes to Eraserhead. It’s been a while, so I can’t really comment on what they think they mean by that, but it’s certainly symptomatic of the with-us or against-us stance of the piece. Maybe there’s some thin methodological or metaphorical relationship between the noise and the film, but mainly it provides a quick laugh for the cognoscenti.