Greater Than Ever

The Baseball Furies might actually be dangerous, but they're more likely to hurt themselves than anyone else, and Greater Than Ever sounds like a shopping cart full of broken bottles hurtling down a steep hill, hilarious and terrifying at the same time. The Furies' brand of blithering hate-boogie is an uneasy compromise between the proudly amateurish pop of first-wave '77 punk and the hedonistic swagger of coked-out cock rock, played at a bristling speed of pharmaceutical origin. Unlike most neo-garage ne'er-do-wells, the Furies aren't just bragging about their debauchery in song, they're digging into the compulsions that fuel these excesses and exposing the steaming, stinking innards for the straight world to see. Abstract rants about proudly squalid lives and paranoid revenge fantasies are slobbered forth while spastic, slashing riffs struggle to escape the rock-solid backbone that keeps the whole mess intact. "I Hate Your Secret Club" is a white funk temper tantrum that gives the finger to the world's elite, "Archenemy" slows the tempo but not the intensity for some righteous New York Dolls riffing and "Antenna Attempt" declares the band's philosophy through broken couplets like "I want the world and it's mine to take it/If not so then I'll violate it" and "End of mission is death if I fail/I gotta de-program radio." It's not easy to capture psychosis live on tape, but the Baseball Furies truly sound like they've been kept awake for days in a locked room and let loose in a crowded bar for a binge of frightening proportions.