Murders in supermarket express lanes. Sex with Chihuahuas. Bank robberies committed in the nude. This is all fodder for Alice Donut songs. The New York quasi-hard-core band spins tales that are both demented and frighteningly believable. The members of A.D. like to think of their songs as "stories of everyday madness."
The brutality and depravity of Alice Donut songs are rarely alienating. Maybe this is because there's a dark, David Lynchian humor present in so much of the material. The group's cult hit from last year, a cover of the Angels' "My Boyfriend's Back," showcases the Donut at its most perversely funny. The band turned the girl-group classic into a grisly, gay-themed melodrama: "My boyfriend's back and he's got the Black and Decker."
It would seem fair to call the band's songs bizarre, but A.D. lead singer Tom Antona thinks that's open to debate. "What's bizarre?" asks Antona. "The lyrics aren't any more bizarre than newspaper stories about Jeffrey Dahmer. They aren't any more bizarre than anything Jesse Helms has ever said. Now, he's really bizarre and offensive."
It's true that Alice Donut's lyrics seem like sunny nursery rhymes compared to some of today's news stories. America's dysfunctional society inspires many of the band's songs. This is especially true of the cuts on its latest album, Revenge Fantasies of the Impotent, which was recorded during the Gulf War.
"We were obsessed," Antona says of the band's mood while making the new LP. "We recorded and mixed the whole thing in 18 hours. We had this tremendous feeling of frustration, of not being able to do anything about what was happening in the world. That's why the record's title seemed so appropriate."
Revenge Fantasies of the Impotent contains two fairly predictable tirades against Operation Desert Storm, "Dead River" and "Teleprintmediadeathwhore." More compelling is a song that deals with revenge fantasies of a personal nature.
"Come Up With Your Hands Out" chronicles the killing spree of a mistreated housewife. The song, which Antona claims is based in fact, culminates with a bloody massacre at a bank, where the woman "grinds her buttocks against the cash machine" and dances naked around her victims. It's a disturbing track, but it forcefully expresses the psychosis lurking just beneath the surface contentment of suburban life.
Antona doesn't sing "Come Up With Your Hands Out," but stammers it out as a spoken monologue. "It was very improvised, the whole thing," explains Antona. "I was correcting myself as I went on. I was just looking at everybody in the studio and telling a story."
Antona's stream-of-consciousness monologues are a staple at Alice Donut concerts. The rest of the band is always on alert to improvise music around one of his rambling narratives, which have addressed everything from industrial accidents to botulism to love. Antona's eloquent babble is said to be in the same league as that of "poetic reporters" like Spalding Gray.
Another thing separating Alice Donut shows from the gigs of your average bar band is Antona's penchant for playing "dress up." The singer has a couple of favorite guises: One is a flowered house dress and soup-can curlers; the other a painted trenchcoat and ski mask, which Antona describes as "basic flasher wear." The singer's theatricality elevates the band's shows to performance art. But the group's music isn't so much arty as diverse. A.D.'s songs--built around dense layers of guitar muck--oscillate wildly between early-Eighties hard-core, Sabbath-style metal and Sub Pop grunge. This has made the group difficult to categorize, and that's just how Antona likes it.
"With each album I hope it becomes harder to label us," Antona says. "The next album--musically and lyrically--is going to be the most schizophrenic of all. I don't think we've even begun to explore the depths of our weirdness."
Alice Donut will perform at the Mason Jar on Sunday, October 6. Showtimes are 5:30 and 9 p.m.
The brutality and depravity of Alice Donut songs are rarely alienating.
America's dysfunctional society inspires many of the band's songs.
Their music forcefully expresses the psychosis lurking just beneath the surface contentment of suburban life.
Stream-of-consciousness monologues are a staple at Alice Donut concerts. Antona's eloquent babble is said to be in the same league as that of "poetic reporters" like Spalding Gray.
