Beirut Slump: Shut Up And Bleed

"It’s no surprise that the material collected on Shut Up and Bleed stands as tall as Yao Ming in platform shoes. Time has eroded much of the initial inaccessibility of barbed stomps such as "Crown of Thorns", leaving behind a deliciously nihilistic, psycho-cheerleader cha-cha. Lunch is a criminally underrated instrumentalist: Heed the drill-bit whinnies that scar "Red Alert" and the ascending, jet-engine whoosh of "Freud in Flop." Substantially improving on the 1995 Teenage Jesus retrospective Everything, the new album affixes decent, if scruffy, archival bonuses (but omits a killer take of "Race Mixing") and wisely restores many, if not all the tunes to their original aural luster. (Thirlwell had frustratingly 'reprocessed' the Jerks' master tapes in the 1980s, adding gobs of strength-sapping reverb.)

Interspersed throughout the track listing are the complete recorded works of Beirut Slump, an obscure quintet that lurked in the shadows during Teenage Jesus's final phases. For this unruly combo, Lunch steps aside to concentrate on her trebly, nightmare-surf strumming and assigns the vocals to Bobby "Berkowitz" Swope, a migrant from Florida's Eckerd College who sings like a nauseous, homosexual Frankenstein menacing you with an ice pick. Vivienne Dick's B-movie organ disfigures the Doors into a bad-acid freak show; Sclavunos and bassist Liz Swope's sluggish tempos anticipate the cruel plod of early Swans. Whereas the Jerks' momentous blurts now come across as abusively catchy, Slump's frazzled "Staircase" and utterly revulsed "See Pretty" continue to pry open some ghastly portal to hell. A wealth of perverse pleasure awaits anyone brazen enough to peer in and gawk." -Dusted Magazine