Mr. California and the State Police might very well be insane — or at least attention deficient (51 songs in 20 minutes means they don’t last long). Blistering noise worthy of Lightning Bolt beats against awkward and essentially screwed-up lyrics right out of the Adam Green songbook, or a perversion of the Adam Green songbook if that’s possible (the titles are self-explanatory: “The Violation of Burt Ward,” “Die Hippy Die,” “Handjob”). And really, by comparison, Lightning Bolt is far more comprehensible than Mr. California — for one, you’ll never find them incessantly shouting “all he needs is free cocaine” (“…And a Girl With Half a Brain”). But then there are songs on Audio Hallucinations that sound like early lo-fi Sonic Youth (“The Deceiver”) or first four years Black Flag (“Sick”). And in light of these, Mr. California makes sense. This is demented no wave music that flies in the face of all conventions (you can’t even label it noise or anti-folk, and those genres are far from conventional). After all, the Dead Boys, Mars, and the Theoretical Girls didn’t always sound good, but in their own challenging ways, somehow they sounded great. – Charles Spano
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