secret fun club Skull With Antlers (LP, £11.50)

San Diego’s Secret Fun Club began in earnest in 2000 as a collaboration among Sal Gallegos (Some Girls), Nathan Joyner (Some Girls, All Leather), and John Rieder. This early three-piece iteration of the band was a collective in need of Ritalin, and during these years, Secret Fun Club was conceived as a kind of repository for whatever idea straddled the line between brutal and silly. The mantra at the time was borrowed verbatim from the lyrics of post-hardcore greats Quicksand: Testing the ends of what they’ll put up with. Nathan left the band to move to LA in order realize his dream of fabricating and marketing mattresses made out of Flaming Hot Cheetos. Suddenly a duo, Sal and John began demoing songs throughout 2007-2008, finally recording what would become the new ThreeOneG LP Skull With Antlers during the first half of 2009. With drums that call to mind Bonham (if he had preferred meth to booze) playing sides of beef and bass tones that alternate between motorcycle rumble and insectoid modulation and filtering, Skull With Antlers is forty-five minutes of doomy frenetic noise with occasional forays into quiet minimalism and copy-and-paste sound sculpture. W.T. Nelson (Geronimo, Bastard Noise) shows up on a couple of tracks with his brood of Trogotronic outboard gear to contribute painful frequencies across the range of human hearing.