A Year of Music

Stuck in my head this morning: “Psychic Squirt” by Severed Heads, from their recent album Under Gail Succubus, mostly because of the way it bastardizes the lyrics to a Carpenters song:

MVRemix: On the track, ‘Psychic Squirt’, you use lyrics from an older song. What was this all about?

Tom Ellard: It’s a bit of ‘Do You Know The Way To San Jose’ by Burt Bacharach. Listen to the original by The Carpenters and then, look at the city now. See how it changed, like a mutant growth. The track sings about mutant growths. Everything around the world now seems to be a mutation that has grown too big like the props from ‘Lost In Space’. The world is over ripe.

I had a hell of a time figuring out which of the nearly innumerable Severed Heads releases the song was on, having only the lyrics to go on, and when I was trying to narrow it down, I realized that my blithe assumption that Severed Heads’ music has settled down in the band’s old age was tragically, deeply wrong. They’re still at least as weird as the Residents, they just seem more normal at first because they use more recognizable samples and slicker-sounding instruments.