Static from the Outside Set, which is allegedly the fourteenth volume in the Sun City Girls' Carnival Folklore Resurrection series, is a poststructuralist mélange that presents by turns astute social commentary, satirical comedy, Southeast-Asian-influenced indie rock, and world music pastiche, all masquerading under the guise of radio show programming. The record's eccentricity and eclecticism offer the listener an admittedly diverse selection of pieces, but Static from the Outside Set's fatal flaw is that it simply cannot decide what it wants to be.
Though the record makes no pretense at being a proper studio album, much of the ostensible spontaneity on Static from the Outside Set sounds contrived and deliberately, nay, meticulously calculated. Nonetheless, the album features a healthy dose of left-leaning, good old fashioned civil disobedience set to music. Seeming to utilize Don Delillo's White Noise as inspiration, Static from the Outside Set is peppered with sensationalist soundbites, snatches of news broadcasts, judiciously chosen song fragments, and other assorted artifacts of cultural detritus and drivel. The four "Radio Neocon" pieces splice together bits of dialogue culled from the news media with more than just a little irony. Static from the Outside Set is a bizarre and frequently hilarious response to the endemic paranoia that has become culturally embedded in the collective American consciousness (see "Anthrax Dandruff," a not-so-subtle dig at Tom Ridge's insipid color-coded "pillar of terror").
Many of the Sun City Girls originals included here feature a decidedly lo-fi quality, replete with tape hiss, A.M. radio static, and other assorted incidental noise; and these pieces serve as a counterweight to the warm, psychedelic richness of the opium-tinged, Indochina-inspired instrumentals against which they are juxtaposed. Throughout the recording persists a fractured, malarial drugginess that hangs like a pall over the proceedings. Upon listening to Static from the Outside Set, this reviewer could not help thinking, on a number of occasions, that the album must have made sense, conceptually and sequentially, when the artists involved were stoned. The two traditional pieces included herein, "Gimme that Wine" and "Gently Johnny," are themselves infused with a sort of weed-addled lethargy, as well as the jazzier numbers.
Granted, the left-wing slant of the album's political satire is fairly heavy-handed and is often needlessly contentious, but Static from the Outside Set is worth the price of admission for two tracks alone. The deadpan recitation of "Lester's Dictionary" and the phlegmatic delivery of "Sacrifice in the USA" are positively hysterical and demonstrate the Sun City Girls' haphazard proclivity toward finely-tuned wit (if comedic brilliance is too strong of a term). In short, Static from the Outside Set is a highly uneven recording, but it certainly has its moments. Definitely one for the hopheads.
1. Introduction By Cantinflas
2. Amuck Theory, The
3. Anthrax Dandruff
4. Spin Capsules
5. Mysteries Behind The Curtain
6. Radio Neocon #1
7. Blanket's Mirage
8. Waco Herdsmen
9. Summer Dream (Amherst 2004)
10. Limerick Anthropology
11. Headaches Forever
12. Sacrifice In The USA
13. Radio Neocon #2
14. Gimme That Wine
15. Give Them The Frequencies
16. Instant Archeology
17. Tea Boy Attitude
18. Radio Neocon #3
19. Lester's Dictionary
20. Iced-Off Broccoli
21. Radio Neocon #4
22. Broken Interlude
23. Gently Johnny
24. Elvis & Machinery
25. Bacchanalia
26. Commercial Message, A
27. Zebra Hymn Tattoo
28. Django-ized
29. End Titles (with Cantinflas)