Consumer Guide Album

The Scene Is Now: Burn All Your Records [Lost, 1985]
Admirers of Red Crayola's Kangaroo?, the only album in history based on Marxist art criticism, will find this hauntingly familiar, not just in its often arcane leftism but in its apparent indifference to musical niceties like vocal pitch. Its pleasures are manifold, and its variety not of the obvious sort you might expect from four guys who play twenty-eight instruments. They combine awkwardness and grace, comedy and admonition, intellect and grunge in politically enlightened proportions. And borrow their pithiest lyric from Mao Tse-Tung. B+