The 88th are one of those bands that you perhaps suspect are making music much more for themselves than for anyone listening.

Listening to the bands two albums, MUSIC FROM THE MOTION PICTURE HELEN KILLER and SPANKING THE SNOWMAN, this is not at times music, more a random series of psycotic sounding noise that gradually and systematically crawls beneath your skin.  MUSIC FROM THE MOTION PICTURE HELEN KILLER starts off with waves of discordant guitar squalls, steady drum beats and disturbing vocals howls and screams that are truly the stuff of nightmares.  The 88th make a noise somewhere between Can, The Butthole Surfers, The Jesus And Mary Chain and the soundtrack to David Lynch's stranger dreams, not something you'll find yourself particularly busting a move to, but definitely something you'll find it hard to forget.

HELEN STREET sounds like a drunken version of The Beastie Boys stuck in a K hole, a paranoid take on rock rap that suggests that The 88th may not be as psychotically deranged as first indications suggest, a sense of fun and ridiculouslessness running through proceedings.

SPANKING THE SNOWMAN is an equally strange and provocative affair, The 88th again indulging in all manner of art rock noise mongering, the opening THE FEEDING a dirge of improvised guitar noise and free form drumming that imagines very early Sonic Youth jamming with Can.  FEEDING THE FIVE HEADED BABY FOR THE HOLIDAYS is another collage of noise and random howls, The 88th landing somewhere between Danzig, Glenn Branca and Sunn O))).

Definitely not your typically melodic pop band, The 88th make a noise that takes words like challenging, disturbing and difficult and then multiplies them by about a hundred.  SPANKING THE SNOWMAN and MUSIC FROM THE MOTION PICTURE HELEN KILLER makes for gloriously uneasy listening at times, as pitch black art rock eccentricity goes, The 88th are a band shambolically balancing the disturbing and the absurd here, truly music to have nightmares to. 

Formed thirty-two minutes from now, The 88th represent all that is good and wholesome in all of us, if only the voices in our collective minds wouldn't keep beating the need to dance out of us. Hailing from parts unknown, this ambiguous quartet is the absurdist act/fortunate happenstance/misinformed outcome of abysmal weather, thefts of electricity and the last golden ticket to be found. Members include Ginger Pecos, who likes to create undulating waves of sound that numb your teeth and toes, but at the end of the day he really just wants you to know that he is both a lover AND a fighter. On bass and vocals, Persephone Chestnut is but a shadow of his former self. Haunted by the dreams of The Old Ones, these songs actually make sense to him. Holding the title of Keymaster, Lamont Sam Houston pounds the ivory with a furor not seen since the Los Angeles riots. As the fellow vocalist for the collective, he is the architect of this house of madness. Finally, Otto Ben Hur is not only the drummer du jour, but is also a 26th level Paladin of the Unholy Beat. His Bag of Holdings is bigger than yours. At the day's last dying light, they are here to act as a public service announcement against the evils of home-recording, and really, just how good it feels to be bad.
http://www.myspace.com/the88th