Australia

Rodney Anonymous vs. the World

by Rodney Anonymous

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Artist: Angelspit

Album: Krankhaus

Country of Origin: Australia

Heart removed neatly with a Bowie knife
Pick up the blade and join the dots
�Angelspit, "Vena Cava"

Sometimes those kids loitering outside Hot Topic at the mall actually hit upon something. Mostly, it's an effective method of shoplifting or some new way to get high (like combining bleach with polar bear droppings). This time it's Krankhaus (from the German for "hospital," which literally translates to "Sick House"), a CD from Angelspit (released in the U.S. on Philly's Dancing Ferret Discs label), an Australian industrial/goth duo composed of DestroyX and ZooG whose crunchy noisefest constitutes the best use of synthesizers since Rick Wakeman unplugged his.

The truly terrific thing about Angelspit is that they don't so much write songs as they create anthems: wonderful, angry, danceable anthems that revolve almost entirely around amateur impromptu surgery performed under less-than-sterile conditions. While it's hard to determine the current state of health care "Down Under" without turning into some sort of book-ready sissy, if Anglespit are to believed, the entire continent is pretty much one giant Island of Dr. Moreau.

Sweet Australian Jesus raising the Crocodile Hunter from the dead, you should buy this CD if for no other reason than because it contains the lyric "God made me a cannibal to fix problems like you."

How can a simple, backward nation like America ever hope to aid a people so advanced that they could engender a band like Angelspit? Seriously, how much further evolved are the Australians than us here in States? That's hard to say, but the Aussies actually have an entire city named after Charles Darwin, while our Smithsonian Institute, perhaps fearing a backlash from Fundamentalists, is not planning one single event to mark the occasion of Darwin's 200th birthday in February of 2009. Why not send them an e-mail at info@si.edu and remind them that caving in to crazy hillbillies has never been a sound policy?

(r_anonymous@citypaper.net)

The Web has a krankhaus: rodneyanonymous.com.