It’s one of life’s great musical pleasures that at the age of 70 Kim Gordon is still making loud abrasive music that’s every bit as antisocial as she was back in downtown NYC in 1981.
Sonic Youth are long gone but Kim’s still fusing the attitude of punk rock with the grinding industrial noise of Suicide, filtered through the claustrophobic tension of Tricky and Massive Attack.
You wouldn’t exactly call it a banger, and it would be optimistic to suggest a melody jumped out at you, but it’s tense gripping in the same sort of way as being pursued by a sinister stranger on a darkened street late at night.
Psychedelic Orgasm somehow seems a perfect title for it, even though I have no idea what it means, or how that relates to the lyric, which is filled with abstract phrases murmured indistinctly deep in the mix.
There’s something about the kids “Tik Toking around, sipping on the smoothies”, something else about “picking out potatoes, $20 each”, LSD, MDMA and magic mushrooms.
Then an autotuned chorus of sorts, repeating the mantra: “LA is an art scene.”
Much of the music sounds like a cement mixer recorded in stereo as machinery clanks in the background; it would make a perfect soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
Very much my kind of thing.