NERVOUS GENDER - Music From Hell 2LP

Highly recommended.

Newly remastered and on expanded double LP

Legendary synthpunk - confrontational, unhinged, and unabashedly queer, Music from Hell is a grail for fans of the strangest underbellies of post-punk, minimal synth, and early industrial music.

Nervous Gender (de)formed in LA in 1978. Following the departure of Phranc - the androgynous embodiment of the band’s name – in 1981, a wide cast of LA freaks would find themselves drawn into the band’s orbit, including Alice Bag of the Bags, Paul Roessler of the Screamers, the Germs’ Don Bolles, and an 8-year old drummer named Sven Pfeiffer.

In 1980, Nervous Gender appeared on the seminal Live at Target compilation alongside Factrix, uns, and Flipper. With the band’s notoriety cemented, Music from Hell followed in 1981 on Subterranean.

Side A, dubbed “Martyr Complex”, presents a more punk-forward sound with live drum salvos and slabs of aggressive synth. These twitchy, unsettling shockers ooze with the kind of snotty misanthropy that will endear them to fans of the Screamers or Crass.

Side B, known as “Beelzebub Youth”, is a live performance the band labeled "an electronic bruto-canto dissertation on the banality of spiritual transcendence." Mutant melodies cede way to synthesized clangs, whirs, bleeps, manipulated tapes, and howls of despair.

In addition to all the material from the original LP, there’s a full disc of the band’s demos, the material from the Live at Target compilation, and early live recordings. Included are unrecognizable covers of Carly Simon and Lou Reed, and the Sex Pistols that are so despairingly skewed they fall into the void.

Includes 36-pg lyric booklet, poster, and gatefold sleeve with photos, flyers, and news-clippings. Tackling taboo issues like sexual kinks, mental illness, drug use, and childhood molestation, Music From Hell is still surprising over 40 years after its release.

Nervous Gender stand as one of the most genuinely anti-establishment outfits in underground music.