No. 42. Alice Donut – The Untidy Suicides of Your Degenerate Children

Part of my 50 greatest albums of all time.

People of a certain age will have a record shop they used to go to a lot. That record shop will have had a pusher (guy who worked there) that they knew well enough to talk about music and get recommendations from. 

Mine was Golden Discs in the Dundalk Shopping Centre but I can’t remember the name of the guy I used to talk to. Mark maybe?

He also organised buses to Dublin for gigs, which is how I got to see a lot of bands I never would have seen otherwise. So whatever his name was, he had a huge impact on taste in music.

He was much older than me (probably 23 to my 16) and was from Dublin, and would regale me with stories of seeing bands I’d only have barely heard of, and on one particular day told me of this really great band he’d seen called Alice Donut and played me Untidy Suicides. And it was just love from the first listen. It’s filthy 90’s alt rock, bass led and just scuzzy.

And it was released on Alternative Tentacles so that was more than enough for me to put my money down.

What a cover eh?

Side one is a pretty wild, filthy alt rock album. The opener Magdalene is all squealing guitars with the backbone built on the bass. It’s that bass that keeps the song moving forward, no matter what the other instruments are up to, and it sets the tone for this side of the record.

This is a good point to give a warning about the lead singer’s voice. It’s going to be a deal breaker for some people. It’s pretty high and nasal and I know more than a few people I loaned this album to couldn’t get past them. It’s a bit Perry Farrell in places but it’s worth persevering with. But I would say that, this is my list.

The side one closer is probably one of their best known songs, the ridiculously named, The Son Of A Disgruntled X-Postal Worker Reflects On His Life While Getting Stoned In The Parking Lot Of A Winn Dixie Listening To Metallica, is a menacing song about a guy freaking out because he’s afraid his dad is going to snap and kill everyone. It’s really good, but again, it’s really 90’s.     

Side two is much stranger. 

Everything gets far more seedy. Where the first side is mostly full on alt rock, side two is where things get mixed with shoegazing and noise rock. 

Medication starts off pretty aggressively but half way through slows and descends into a wall of noise. The layers of fuzz are glorious and to this day, this is the only song I know of with a food processor used in it, which as a filthy tone goes, works really well with the guitar noise.  

Things Have Never Looked Better continues the feeling of everything falling apart, just slow dissonant guitars, crawling through the song till it speeds up, revelling in its noise as it cheers on the end of the world.

I’m probably making this album sound a lot more inaccessible than it is. This is pretty catchy stuff, there’s lots of vocal harmonies and the bass lines are fantastic. The drummer also plays the trombone. What’s not to love? 

This album was really fucking weird in the 90’s and it’s still pretty weird today, but it’s the way the bass leads the music that has this album on my list. It’s one of my favourite things in music and I’ve always been a bit disappointed that most bands don’t write like that. Guitarist’s egos would never allow it I guess.

Untidy is a strange album but it’s definitely a cornerstone of my taste in music. 

https://songwhip.com/alice-donut/the-untidy-suicides-of-your-degenerate-children