M.O.T.O. have released so much top-notch no-budget tuneage over the last thirty-five years that they make Wesley Willis look like Duke Nukem by comparison. I don’t think nature really intended for there to be a middle ground between Guided By Voices and Sloppy Seconds, but, by damn, this dude went and invented one anyway. Crunchy, catchy, off-the-wall shit—if there’s ever a wax museum dedicated to pointless genius, Paul Caporino is a first-ballot inductee. Anyway. This album is a reissue of a 1987 cassette, and, as is usually the case with M.O.T.O., every song is either a neo-classic or a momentarily arresting curiosity, as the case may be—sort of like a DQ Blizzard made with sex and pus and killing instead of Reese’s Pieces®. The main drawback to this album is that the percussion is provided by a Mattel® Synsonics™ drum machine—one of the first drum machines on the market that was kinda affordable to the average schmoe (the fact that it was manufactured by toymaker Mattel® should tell you all you need to know about how it sounds—if not, just imagine an autistic android child snapping a balloon with a rubber band for a half hour)—ergo, the record comes off more like a songwriting demo than something by which to get aurally absorbed. Let’s face it, if the Standells would have recorded “Man, Woman and Child” fifty years ago, we’d all own about twenty cover versions of it. Then again, this way you have fewer versions to buy. BEST SONG: “Man, Woman and Child.” BEST SONG TITLE: “One Good Dose of Nyquil.” FANTASTIC AMAZING TRIVIA FACT: Yes, I owned a Mattel Synsonics drum machine in the ‘80s. –Rev. Nørb (Rerun, rerunrecordsstl.com)