Ugly Hate Machine, Happy Birthday to Hot Nerds’ Strategically Placed Bananas, 3/10/15

Hot Nerds’ Strategically Placed Bananas LP, released six years ago today, is a brutish pummel of shrieking noise. It sounds like Eric Paul (Doomsday Student, Chinese Stars) doing a one-man stage adaptation of Eraserhead as a tribute to PiL. (All of that meant in the best possible way.)

If this record were a person it would be a fucking asshole. These 10 tracks are nasty, mean, and aggressively, gloriously spikey. They’re also innovative, catchy, and stripped entirely of cliches amidst “the fuck ALL of you EVERYWHERE for ALL of time” stance, which as stances go can feel thrilling when you need that particular dark matter. It’s a supernova-ing star run through a synth, a nightmare of interstellar demon sex.

Get too close to this black hole and you will be sucked in–possibly for good.

Maybe you’ll welcome that.

Right?

Who HASN’T been, like, “Beam me up, Scotty. Fuck this shitty goddamn timeline”?

I sure as hell have.

Because while 2020 is over, we’re still living in its stupid wake. 2021? Same ol’ diarrhea in a different shotglass.

Black hole, come on in, have a drink, make yourself at home…

–Adam Gnade, author of Locust House and Float Me Away, Floodwaters