DANTE'S DISNEYLAND INFERNO

That ought to get your attention. This is most certainly one of Sun CIty Girls' major works, and a rarity in their discography in that it sticks to a consistent theme and artistic vision, even as it sprawls insanely over three full LPs (or two full length CDs). As seen in the title of the work, Dante's Inferno was a starting point, but the Sun City Girls have taken this loose idea to create a mad fun house of graphic murder ballads, depraved childrens' songs, mind-blowing spoken treatises and poetry, and just a general sense of gleeful menace. This is how they choose to depict their idea of Hell. But it's not really a spooky work, and it certainly isn't very serious. But it's pretty intense, and it's pretty fun too.

There's over 30 tracks on this album, so I'll just hit some representative tracks and highlights:

"Sexy Graveyard" -- the 11 minute opener with quiet, unsettling percussion sounds and animalistic grunts and growls. Like a haunted graveyard at night, basically. "The Brothers Unconnected" - spoken word piece with minimal musical background, a bar room conversation detailing a graphic sexual role-playing game involving Marilyn and JFK masks. "Geography of the Swastika" -- one of the many appearances of "Uncle Jim" in the SCG discography, a character (brought to life by bassist Alan Bishop, I believe) who is a smooth talking beatnik jazz poet, but supercharged with paranoia and rage at the state of the world. Not political per se, but existential cynicism mellifluously shelled out in rapid-fire rants. All this with an absolutely cool jazz backing for 11 minutes. Far out. "A Man is an Insect is a Flame" -- a short song with a folk/children's melody, but played and sung as if by cavemen banging rocks together. And the lyrics are just wacked. "Bitter Cold Countryside" -- a singalong folk murder song, a bunch of country folk singing verse after verse about "city slickers" who came to town and ended up lynched, sung with drunked blood lust and glee in their voices. "Dear Anybody" -- A really funny sounding loping melody sung over an oom-pah electric piano part. Sounds like nonsense at first, but it all makes sense by the end. That's what they do a lot of the time on this album: it sounds like a joke, but they sprinkle it with serious bits of wisdom and profound observations so that you don't know quite what to think. It's Dada that won't let go of your collar. "Let's Pretend" -- the closest thing to a rock song on here, this song is loud, harsh and angry. Love it.

Not a lot of mention of music in the above descriptions -- this is one of those Sun City Girls albums where the music is mostly used as background, and the words are what's important. That may be off-putting to prog fans, but overall I think the words are good enough, and the album's concept is strong enough, to be a very worthwhile listen for fans of the outer fringes of musical art. As a massive chunk of frightfully focused macabre art, it falls just short of being a masterpiece partly because there are a few too many purely spoken word pieces that, while good in themselves, don't really lend themselves to a perfect score on a music site. A strong 4.

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