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Artist
The Surgeon General
5+ albums
about
THE SURGEON GENERAL - MULTI-PURPOSE GLUE "Dark, postmodern instrumental styling, created out of boredom in Millbraean suburbia" sounds ludicrous to most listeners. But the thick industrial layering of the Surgeon General is all about stretching Fruity Loops to its creative limits, cutting deep, nautical bass lines, angular keyboard riffs, and tangy, brilliant, cymbal-heavy drumming (along with other percussive layers of sound) into mind blowing, psychedelic-punk-metal spasms that makes the Boston Pops Orchestra seem a little sparse. Influence-wise the Velvet Underground can be detected, shading the introspective "Machine Wash Only", while other blaring Led-Zep phrasings run rampant through bombastic songs like "Argh", or the bouncing "4&24". But it's the more idiosyncratic tracks that stand out. On the spicy "Beef Tenders", the General melds Latin percussion with heavy post-rock drumming. He invents new musicalities defying the conventions of all art from Pachebel to Oasis. Traditional chording is slaughtered by the tonality-shifting shifting "Frustration". Like a disgruntled patriarch on family vacation, He careens through an incredible number of styles, trimming the fat, searing the goods to perfection, and dousing the results in strange foreign sauces. This, in other words, is not the Beatles. And if you give your ears up to the operations of the General for an hour, you may find yourself setting fire to your other records. -Phil Derger, Music Critic (http://philderger.