A recent issue of Arthur featured a few selections of anti-Bush poetry that felt more like stiff pieces of propaganda than works of art. I need not expound at length on the irony of attacking an opponent through his own deplorable tactics; hopefully we're all reasonable adults and realize that. The Bay Area's underground rock community seems not to, however, with Porest's most recent offering being the latest slice of flabby rhetoric to come from the area.
To songwriter Mark Gergis's credit, there's a lot of good music on Tourrorists! "Continental Revolt" is a riotous Asian folk shindig, sounding like a cut from a Sublime Frequencies release on angel dust. "Magic Carpet of Holocaust Revival" slithers into an acoustic trance state, and "Tropical Cancer" provides an equally tripadelic dose of kraut-drone and found sounds. The album travels in largely the same orbit as Abduction label bosses Sun City Girls' work, but it's a more playful and kinetic affair.
The overtly political statements are where Gergis loses his focus. In a number of tracks, he takes sound bites from white, middle-class Americans and splices them into clumsily satiric dialogues. A businessman becomes a terrorist who wants to start a holy war. A female missionary becomes an agent of discord. These tracks ask interesting questions about America's motivations and hypocrisies, but Porest poses them with one-dimensional sarcasm that makes for weak storytelling and even weaker politics. For an album that asks us to listen to the other side (the terrorists' side) of the story, Tourrorists! offers far too many flat characters and transparent situations.
1. Little Fiddle
2. Continental Revolt
3. Let's Roll
4. Eye of the Leopard
5. Levantine Spirit
6. We Eat the People
7. Mach Mach
8. Hoyda
9. Monshallahm Visit
10. INS Urgent
11. Magic Carpet of the Holocaust Revival
12. Tropical Cancer
13. OFEK Down
14. Meat Supply
15. Pentagonal Parlor