Is nothing sacred? this alternative thing has definitely spun out of control when the Butthole Surfers – America's worst underground-rock nightmare, a band that began terrorizing jaded scenesters when Alice was in training Chains and that still has problems getting its name printed in family newspapers – release an album on a reputable major label.

With forty-six-year-old former Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones adding little more than appropriate incongruity as producer, these Texans abandon the double-cross nihilist irony of Piouhgd (1991) – no Garry Shandling tributes or so-bad-they're-bad Donovan covers this time – for a no-holds-barred return to chain-saw-massacre overload. (There is, however, one banjo-driven ballad on which Jones plays bass.) If Independent Worm Saloon offers little in the way of songs to hum, few records can beat it for sheer guitar-choking feedback ecstasy.

Track after track, the rhythm section lays down a juggernaut of Seventies punkmetal boogie (or, in one case, a waltz) while guitarist Paul Leary whacks the shit out of whatever strings and whammy bars can survive his mutilating onslaught. Following Surfers tradition, singer Gibby Haynes's absurd acid fantasies, like "Who Was in My Room Last Night?," are delivered through various electronic distortion devices, reaching a funny-voice pinnacle in "The Annoying Song." Although protectors of public decency probably couldn't care less by this point, the Buttholes still work overtime to offend, whether by screaming "I don't give a fuck about the FBI" in "Goofy's Concern," offering a spoken-word vignette about recycled sweets ("Chewin' George Lucas' Chocolate") or beginning "Clean It Up" with a minute of audio vérité spew noises.

Ironically, in the face of such affronts as Nine Inch Nails and Billy Ray Cyrus, the Surfers' savage psychedelia sounds timidly unfocused and faintly quaint. The veteran band's raging inferno tears an entertaining enough hole in the ozone, but these wild-eyed slackers hail from a different hell than today's sonic reducers and seem out of step. Kicks just keep getting harder to find.... (RS 658)

IRA ROBBINS