Kill Me Tomorrow

Hot damn! Another concept album. With recent releases such as the Mars Volta's De-Loused in the Comatorium, Cursive's The Ugly Organ and Racebannon's Satan's Kickin' Yr Dick In, the gears on this idea are starting to get stripped -- as if they weren't already eroded enough in the '70s. What saves The Garbageman and the Prostitute from the scrap heap is the fact that Kill Me Tomorrow is perhaps the most violently stupid and abrasive band to ever stick thirteen songs together and call it a "rock novel." This San Diego trio has existed in various incarnations for the past eight years, but it was with 2003's Skin's Getting Weird EP that the group's lineup and approach solidified.

Make that coagulated. Kill Me Tomorrow's music is a clotted, bloody aggregate of slivered guitar, jerky keyboards, spastically pneumatic rhythms and the entwined caterwauling of Zack Wentz and K8 Wince -- a married couple who recall Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon (or Mark E. and Brix Smith) with their penchant for strung-out, deadpan sexual tension. It's all apropos of Garbageman's overarching plot: a loose, hallucinatory chain of events that somehow links werewolves, evil multinationals, decrepit superheroes, Xerox machines and sexual debauchery while paraphrasing Lionel Richie. Like organic tissue camouflaging a cybernetic endoskeleton, Kill Me Tomorrow's sloppy sonic façade is propped up by a cold, vicious cunning that makes most concept-album themes (Ayn Rand, The Lord of the Rings, crippled kids, etc.) seem downright mundane by comparison. When you've finally worn out that copy of OK Computer -- that's okay, there's still a little life left in it -- steel yourself for this.