Okay, let’s get this straight: This isn’t music. These aren’t songs. Not the sort you’re used to anyway. These here are snapshots of the febrile imagination of one potty-mouthed pre-pubescent, a 10- year-old boy from Elma, Washington who, during the mid-80s, felt like getting on tape some of the things that mattered to him (He-Man, the sheer brilliance of dinosaurs, fear of global armageddon). Armed with a mighty array of sound-makers (pots, pans, toy guns, garden rakes and a Snake Mountain microphone [you remember Snake Mountain, Skeletor’s place, where he hatched all his half-baked plans to rule Eternia, only to be thwarted by its muscle-bound champion]), Human Skab, aka Travis Roberts, rallied the neighbourhood kids and led them through a batch of heady homegrown hoo-hah and everything-plus-the kitchen-sink skits.
This reissue of a 1986 cassette forms the missing link between Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica and Virginia’s long-forgotten spazz merchants Happy Flowers. Pieces such as Screamin’ Demons and We Need To Destroy The Soviet Union, aren’t just (a)cute insights into the formative universe of an American adolescent, but a time machine taking us back to the recording of our own anarchic radio shows with sympathetic siblings. Cause we all did that… didn’t we?
