Pachinko: Behind The Green Pachinko

The music of the noisecore masters in Pachinko is easy to quantify: It's 5 percent impossibly catchy pop guitar hooks, while the remaining 95 percent consists of the overdriven, fed-back equivalent of the sound a cat makes while trying to shit through a sewn-up asshole. Behind the Green Pachinko is brutal, unrelenting, and an absolute scowl-faced blast. On tracks like "The Jump The Gorge" (a tribute to Evel Knievel), and "Victory Lap" (about all-time dirt-track race champ Dick Trickle), vocals which seem to invariably sneer at the showoff behavior of small men are somehow shouted over a monolithic wall of Cherubs-like sludge. All 17 songs lurch just about perfectly along the line between entertaining and excruciating, particularly the band's hidden-track cover of the Monkees' "She," which throbs with its own unclean energy. Behind the Green Pachinko is loud, mean, angry, and one of the few punk recordings that's as tough as it thinks it is.