It was only recently that I picked up a hand-labeled copy of the first self-published album by “surrealist rock” band Burn Your Eyes Inside—although to be fair I think Ceci n’est pas une musique was more of a demo CD, and the copy I acquired may have been either bootlegged or from an A&R rep’s discarded collection. Still, I was impressed by the classic psychedelic quality, the unashamed naïvety of 60s dark/high fantasy themes, and the sheer silliness of the vocal and musical interaction.
Having enjoyed the first “album,” when I learned that the second Burn Your Eyes Inside release was now available not only as “pay what you like” MP3, but could be ordered as a home-pressed CD via Paypal, I took a leap of faith at the chance to pick that up too. I’m listening to it now, although it reminds me of the Captain Beefheart tapes that are in a box under my bed somewhere, which I might have to dig out and listen to for the first time in ten years.I don’t want to flatter BYEI that they have singlehandedly awakened in me a love of free-form or surreal musical styles; if anything it’s remembering that Beefheart did this shit better. But this second album departs so wildly from the psych-rock pastiche of Ceci n’est pas… that for a while I wondered if I hadn’t inadvertently picked up a demo by a different band of the same name. Where the former teased and titillated us with childish terrors and drug-induced tomfoolery, Military Pizza disorients and discords our senses with clunky refrains and technically ugly jazz virtuosity. To the untrained ear, there’s little to link these two albums on the musical level.
What convinced me that I had not made a mistake even before my first listen to Military Pizza, however, was the clear and consistent horror aesthetic that pervades the œuvre. Where Ceci n’est pas… gave us rabbit holes and snow witches and transvestite crusaders, claustrophobia and cannibalism and war crimes, the nightmares in this new collection are more fuck-you, more psychological, inward-facing and contemporary. Night terrors, asylum imagery, hallucination and dysfunctional families all make an appearance, although the lyrics are rarely the most prominent part of any of the songs.
The opening track, “Milk Safe,” is an obvious homage to Beefheart, at least in title and in eccentric mixing, although his obsessive repetitive refrains are more evident in the long and electronic “Pepper On I’?” whose beat is almost as migraine-inducing as the faux-Brit-punk voiceover. “Don’t Believe Me” is an Evanescence-inspired mental-health industry nightmare, which becomes muted, cloudy and cotton-wool smothered mid-way through to represent the progressive sedation of the protagonist. An instrumental piece, “Rain Night,” features electric piano and woofed-base mixed hard to the left, and acoustic guitar and hand-drums mixed all the way to the right, so you feel almost like you’re sat in a concert hall with competing bands on opposite stages. It’s a better idea than it is a song, but it grows on you (and if you don’t sit right between the speakers it’s not quite so much of an ear-fuck).
Slightly longer than Ceci n’est pas la musique, which would have fit on one side of a 12” vinyl disc back in the day, Military Pizza runs to 33 minutes of oddly-mixed music. While I didn’t love it as much as the earlier album, which sometimes spontaneously makes it onto a Friday night playlist, this more experimental outing is worth a listen, and might even be useful in setting the atmosphere for certain types of especially pretentious poetry gatherings. I’ll be super careful before shelling out for anything Burn Your Eyes Inside bring out in future though, if they keeping pissing with our expectations like this.
