Pitchfork

A bandname could be expected to describe the music at hand, but as such Heavy Trash is misleading. The Jon Spencer side project has created a mirage of an album, a ghostly echo so light it's barely there. Talk about music that burrows in your brain: Spencer and fellow dumpster diver Matt Verta-Ray (Speedball Baby) ride a candy Cadillac on hypnosis spinners, pumping haunted psychobilly all the way to the asylum. It ain't always fun.

Cheeky, carnivalesque, brain-curdling-- who besides the completely delusional would actually enjoy this stuff? Probably the same people who fantasize breaking down at an abandoned gas station somewhere in the Nevada deep desert. Spencer's voice trembles over badlands vistas, stirring up all manners of strange sediment. Consider "Dark Hair'd Rider", one of the album's most stable cuts: Two curt guitar solos ride atop smoggy bashed toy cymbal, making you cough and wheeze.

Spencer's vox are still sick and dirty. If nothing else, give him credit for knowing how turn a perfectly nice blues-rock dance party into revulsive sex-drug splooge. Pared down from Blues Explosion's chunky chug, Heavy Trash build a sound primarily with drums and rollicking Epiphone. (Tube amp? Reverb? Check, check.) The most effective songs are the emptiest. "The Loveless" gets by on Spencer's oily curled-lip vocal, sounding not unfrightening against a hollowed-out two beat. He's "a mean son of a bitch," ya know.

"Gatorade" is similarly discomforting. Feeling low, Spencer says to his baby, "Fix me up fast with some, um, good first aid/ Hit me with a blast of that Gatorade." The narrative continues over tip-toeing plucked guitar, cycling back to the vociferous-by-comparison chorus: "Gatorade! Gatorade!/ Tastes so good, I'm amazed." Creepiest part is the final, whispered "Gatorade..." at song's end. Could be the aging bluesman is subliminally, metaphorically, insidiously promoting drug use-- or just seeing who he can get to shit pants.

Straighter joints like "The Hump", which channels ancient Stones, sound good, but miss out on the intense visceral weirdness of the strictly guitar/drums howlers. So we kind of get two albums, and a dilemma. Daftness offset by songs like boot-stomper "Lover Street" and drippy ballad "Fix These Blues," the album confounds. But a more consistent, non-capitulatory Heavy Trash would be basically unbearable, a free ride to the bughouse-- no longer a band, but a sentence.