1996's Pound is a 40-song onslaught of sheer weirdness that enthralls and disturbs in roughly equal measures. By this point in Stephen Fievet's career, his deliberately tasteless comic strip Babysue was taking most of his time, and the calculated-to-offend aesthetic of that strip informs part of this album, as in the self-explanatory song title "Retarded Fucker" and the urban legend-based "KKK Crown." However, the really disturbing parts of the record are those songs that feature Fievet's increasingly hostile, alienated, and despairing world view, which is nearly all of them. Songs like "Teething Brain," "Take It Away," and "I Don't Mean Anything to You" read like the diary entries of an antic paranoid schizophrenic with a really dark sense of humor, and the fact that they're set to such catchy little guitar pop melodies only makes them sound stranger. The thing is, Fievet is such a dead pan put-on artist that it's impossible to tell if Pound is the work of a singer/songwriter who is slowly losing his grip on reality or perhaps just another of Fievet's style exercises. Either way, those who can't deal with solo Roky Erickson or Syd Barrett records should probably stick to LMNOP's more innocuous early records. Four of the tracks were on 1993's cassette-only release Mnemonic.
© Stewart Mason /TiVo