Music

Photo by Matt OttoGUSTER
NINE-SONG DEMO CD

It's the Velvet Revolver of OC! Meaning it's a bunch of guys from bands we've known of for years—K.C. from the Co-dependents, Hedge from Mr. Mirainga, Jorge from Smear—plus one guy we've never heard of (Cooper from the Death Mickies, you're the Dave Kushner of Disguster). The music is deliciously retro, with accents of MC5-ish rock & roll, stoopid/funny clichés snipped from the pages of '80s-hair-band playbooks ("Free Pie" is essentially a bawdy vagina parable—like Warrant's "Cherry Pie," but, y'know, free),and—buried deeply, but we can hear the weakened cries for help beneath the rubble—the kind of joyfully loud hypersoul we used to get from the BellRays whenever they'd play the old Club Mesa. Unsurprisingly, a lot of these songs are rooted in sexual frustration: "I Loves Me the Women," "Artificial Human Companion," even the cover of Zep's "Communication Breakdown," which is really about impotency, anyway. They also have one called "Rock On," which appears to be about . . . er, rocking on. But bands with names like Disguster ain't about poetry. It's the riffage, baby, and in a ribald tune such as "No More," the guitars sound like something that oozes from every greasy redneck bar band, not necessarily a bad thing. K.C. croons a lot of sloshy, unintelligible lines when he's not cryptically enunciating ("Baby, I'm a dreamer/I've found my horse and carriage"—whaaa? Oh, wait—that actually reads like a masturbation ode), and the whole band seem to be really into what's going on, barfing up a fun, flattening set of nine tunes in slightly more than 20 minutes. For a supergroup, Disguster will do nicely.

Contact: www.myspace.com/disguster; disgusterrock@yahoo.com.

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