Album Review by Driscoll (6/16/02)
I have a stack of records I grab whenever I'm cleaning up around the house. This is not one of them. I have a set of albums I listen to when I am laying back and going to sleep. This is not one of them, either. But it's not because the album isn't energetic, and it's not that this album isn't dreamy. The truth is that this album is the half-breed child of Joy Division's "Dead Souls" and "White Light/White Heat" on acid with an underlined blues influence reminiscent of a half passed-out master who's been playing twelve straight days and can barely stand to touch the mike.
Oddly enough, "For All the Fucked Up Children" is still laced with enough raw energy to power New York City during a hurricane. But unlike its comparator, this energy is sopping wet with a slap in the face reservationism. The band seems to try harder to withhold using their energy than it does to actually make the music. The result is a strange and mentally collapsed masterpiece teetering on the edge of the grand canyon and not caring one way or the other. It's this sort of forgotten desperation that gave birth to rock and roll in the first place.
This album gleams with a sandpaper gloss and yields a retro-neo madness-inducing intoxicating effect that can only be compared to the sound the Buddha would have made had someone run over his testicles with a dump truck full of old church pews. So I have therefore christened the album "The orgasm achieved by acupuncture with railroad stakes on a half bottle of Jack Daniels" and leave it at that.