Butthole Surfers – Rembrandt Pussyhorse Vinyl

The early-mid ‘80s had their share of insane combos — The Birthday Party, Black Flag and Minor Threat had the raw power to melt your mind in seconds. SWANS, Einsturzende Neubauten and Big Black created enough overwhelming sonic pressure their sounds might actually flatten you. And Sonic Youth displayed such a dizzyingly unpredictable mix of art, pop culture and violence you’d sometimes leave their shows drooling. The Buttholes shared elements with all of these groups, but added an insane psychedelic edge and a propensity for bizarre spectacle.

40 years later, The Butthole Surfers have announced their first batch of reissues in collaboration with Matador Records certain to raise the roof for a lot of people who thought they had a pretty good handle on the outer realms of the ‘80s indie-rock scene. And while the recordings are not the fully immersive experience of the Buttholes in concert, you may still feel as though you’ve fallen down a rabbit hole the size of Texas itself.

The band’s evolution continued with ‘Rembrandt Pussyhorse,’ which featured a set of tunes for which the Buttholes’ rock-based form destruction was mixed with experimental, tape-mangling passages of many flavors.

Gabby Haynes was handling all audible vocals by this point, and his mastery of post-tongue dynamism was finally in full flight. Meanwhile, their live shows became legendary examples of excess and derangement, and their music just kept getting louder and stranger and more savage. It was the diametric opposite of the hardcore scene from which it had emerged, which was heading in ever more codified and stylistically conservative directions.