A friend once described the prog-rock band Dream Theater thusly: "It's like, you wanna get into the groove, but you can't, 'cause once you get into the groove, they change the goddamn time signature. Like, five times in one song."

The Rancid Yak Butter Tea Party follows a similar premise, but these boys don't switch time signatures- they swap entire genres. Longtime cult favorites in local dives, the Tea Party leaps to its self-titled solo debut with a great deal of its schizophrenic art- metal schtick intact. The debt these boys owe to Faith No More is truly awe-inspiring, but so too is what the Tea Party got for its money.

A musical idea here lasts an average of, oh, say, 25 seconds. Behold thrash metal, new wave, piano jazz, keyboard droning prog- rock, salsa, lounge, ska-punk and hippie wankery, all melted down to their respective essences and looped together into half-minute clips that link together like deformed, demonic Lego pieces. The end result is about 800 feet tall, and will certainly put your eye out, if it doesn't burn your house down.

You can find this sort of thing brilliant or cloying; the Tea Party invites either opinion. A band can phone this kind of thing in- the trick is giving it cohesion, which happens maybe half the time here. No one's questioning the Tea Party's range, or its dedication to scaring the crap out of everyone. But there's a right and a wrong way to do this.

The manic, incoherent opener, All Noise, illustrates the latter. But then you hit Sniffing Death, which takes the same film noir riff and carries it through the speed metal and hippie jam band portions of the song, before a long, moody keyboard-driven bridge barges in. Splendid.

From there, Dick Dale surfer nightmares (Six) and heavy-mental, Addams Family like drones (Melody) bleed out your speakers- midway through this 15- track monstrosity, you're either gleefully destroying furniture or ready to just lie down.

Sometimes you'd be better off lying down. The dynamic whirl of tunes like the new wavey Io lose some of their spark in a non-dive setting, and on occasions, the combined effect of all this suddenly strikes you as pretty dumb (La-Di-Da).

Furthermore, this would perhaps work best as an all-instrumental affair; the screaming's OK, the singing worse.

But these are minor quibbles directed at a record I wouldn't advise quibbling with. The Tea Party's manic personality always stands out- you gotta love any band that shouts the title of a song before playing it ("Tarantula!"), and the disc's signature trick of breaking a song down with staccato metal chords (DA! DA- DA!! DA DA-DA!!!) still cracks me up everytime. These boys may leave you with a splitting headache and no idea what planet you're on, but you'll be grateful for the out-of-body experience.

-Rob Harvilla
The Other Paper, Vol. 11, No. 51
October 4- 10, 2001