Crazy Price

If you're looking for evidence of a complete breakdown in Russia's social order, look no further than this bizarre (but strangely wonderful) album by the Messer Chups collective. The core of the group seems to be multi-instrumentalist Oleg Gitarkin and harpist Maria Kapelova, but several guest musicians are credited as well. And whenever one member of a band plays the harp and more than one guest is listed as a Theremin player, you know you're in for some weird stuff. Messer Chups' music is a creepy, bubbling stew of surf guitar, sadomasochistic sexual imagery, 1950s sci-fi movie soundtracks, and goofy Satanism. Half of what makes this album fun is the gloriously awful Pidgin English of the song titles: "Gangster They Called Horizon-Man," "A Plateful Brain," "In 3 Minutes Till Massacre," "Sex Euro and Evils Pop" — you get the idea. The campy, trashy guitar and Theremin are punctuated by vintage spoken word samples and lots of female screaming and groaning — sometimes sexual, sometimes painful, sometimes disturbingly (if predictably) both. And the disc includes several music videos, all of which are direct visual corollaries to the music: go-go-girl footage old and new, skeletons, hilariously campy space aliens and flying saucers, and so on. Irony is alive and well behind the former Iron Curtain. Or alive and sick, anyway. Which may be even better.