Eats Tapes: Dos Mutantes
Tigerbeat6

Eats Tapes (Marijke Jorritsma and Greg Zifcak) reigns in the wackiness ever so slightly on its second full-length Dos Mutantes by grounding ten hot-wired ravers in stomping techno beats. The San Francisco outfit transmutes its lo-fi battery of sequencers, synths, drum machines, and a MIDI-controlled Nintendo into fifty raucous minutes of acid bass gobble and eight-bit mayhem. In cuts like the aptly-named clodhopper “Face Shredder” and the banging “Full Blast,” arcade melodies spurt, cell phones bleep, and electronics squeal alongside writhing feedback and spastic struts.

Though Eats Tapes seemingly cultivates a rather prankster persona, there's nothing laughable about the seriously grooving beats that power one of the album's best cuts, the punchy “Lemon Drop.” The zenith of insanity is reached with “Tenderizer” where dental drill electronics combust over a slippery stomp, and might that be Lester Bowie's trumpet splatter blowing through the rollicking bleepfest “Band Practice”? “Hotel California” is decidedly not—mercifully—The Eagles' ‘classic' though it'd be worth enduring it one more time just to hear Eats Tapes destroy it, and, no doubt, a single listen to “Wolf Blitzer” would turn the CNN news figure's hair grey if it weren't so coloured already. One more thing: don't drive for at least a day or two after viewing Nate Boyce's “Tenderizer” video whose maggot-infested computer imagery makes for a natural complement to Mat Brinkman's mutant digipack artwork. All in all, a much more satisfyingly musical outing than one might have expected from the provocateurs.

April 2007