It Just Gets Worse

It's kind of surprising -- and perhaps disturbing -- that Anal Cunt, aka A.C., is still recording at the end of the '90s, since one might have thought they had exhausted their basic premise. 1998's Picnic of Love was a departure into smart-assed, falsetto-sung acoustic ballads, but It Just Gets Worse is a return to the standard A.C. sound. Half the fun of any A.C. release is reading the 40 or 50-odd song titles the group comes up with for their gonzo blasts of noise, since there's always at least some inspired lowbrow humor to be found. However, It Just Gets Worse is the first time they've seemed outright stupid. Granted, that doesn't mean it's never funny -- A.C. can crack some pretty creative stupid jokes -- but the subject matter of the jokes (AIDS, Nazis, rape, homosexuals, sperm banks, pedophilia, and infanticide) pushes a lot of buttons that are very easy to push. The humor is so obviously calculated to offend that it's a pointless waste of energy to get angry about it, and even if A.C. is funnier than most bands mining this territory, it still comes off as pretty predictable. So does the music -- A.C.'s signature grind hasn't changed all that much over the years, and if you've heard one album, you pretty much know what the others sound like. It seems at this point that they've taken the joke as far as it will go. ~ Steve Huey|