Heroine Sheiks - Out of Aferica CD

Out of Aferica and passing once again through the Reptilian immigration department. Shannon Selberg’s entirely reconfigured, revamped Heroine Sheiks have lab tested 11 brand new, fully assembled, tuned and torqued songs – not ideas for songs, not experimental keyboard games – but nothing shy of his finest body of work since the Cows seminal Sexy Pee Story, if not better. The new line-up subverts its four on the floor rock sensibilities, using active riffage and rhythm, but fucking it up just the right amount. Shannon’s vaudevillian creepshow has never been this well utilized, showing the amount of restraint and excess at the right times in exploring his menagerie of hard luck characters. Age and musical maturity have chiseled away the unnecessary parts of the persona, gone is the drawn-on mustache of shock and in its place the true five o’clock shadow of the narrative mindfuck. The album begins with the subdued darkness of “Stabbed by an Angel” into the Flipper and Fang brain-screw of “Cock Asia”, setting the tone for much of the record – heavy-handed guitar work, perfectly placed bugle and keyboard flourishes, and Shannon’s slippery, alley-cat vocals. The upbeat “Break Up” introduces a three person (but just one Shannon) conversation of weird-ass romantic problems, “Brooklyntown Romeo” unfolds with another raw storyline. “Jaws of Life” is as dank as anything from the first Unsane record. “The Obscenery” is Shannon channeling mid-70’s Lou Reed quite well, singing – yep, singing – over a slowly unfolding piano line. Selberg rarely gets the lyrical credit he deserves, with each song unpeeling like a cracked-up, narrative orange peel of seedy life. The kinda folks you meet late at night in poorly lit, smoky rooms, the kind of places Selberg’s spent the last twenty years, unrepentantly.


Its origins are obscure, its symptoms are controversial and in mainstream circles it’s very existence has been largely ignored. The organism is now thought to have originally mutated from Cows and Swans in New York City in 1999, where it made the “jump” to humans, causing them to gather into groups and engage in large scale alchohol consumption, casual sex and other illicit activities—seemingly against their wills.

The press turned a blind eye, hoping the problem would go away. But THE HEROINE SHEIKS hung on, surviving by constantly mutating into different and ever more virulent strains that defy treatment or even classification. Most disturbing about it’s present form is that after it infects its victims, it leaves them immune to the effects of other music. There is no cure. Though it is presently found mostly in small, scattered, urban communities around the globe, many scientists fear that it is only a matter of time before there is a massive world-wide outbreak. In the interest of educating the public, we shall now examine this organism’s individual components:

CREIGHTON CHAMBERLAIN is vital to this organism’s deceptiveness. His relatively harmless appearance is mitigated by his savage and constantly mutating use of a simple toy Casio keyboard. Is the victim hearing a trombone? A bass? And what of the bizarre vibrating “noises” that seemingly originate in the listeners own head?

ERIC ROBEL is key to how such a shape-shifting cell retains its internal cohesiveness. Using rhythm to form a sort of ectoplasmic “spinal column” heretofore never observed in nature, Roebel creates a structural anchor that makes the other components more dangerous than they would otherwise be.

ROB KIMBALL’s bass is firmly attached to this “spine’”, but it also vibrates according to it’s own inscrutable timetable. Though this has been likened to a “heartbeat”, scientists readily concede that a creature of this nature could not possibly have a “heart” as the word is generally understood.

MARTIN ROS -- The function of the guitar in The Heroine Sheiks is much disputed. While it is agreed that it plays the role of RNA molecules, scientists cannot agree whether its main function is that of a vicious predatory weapon or a bizarre sexual organ. Perhaps, like the horrible beak of the Giant Squid, it serves a dual purpose.

SHANNON SELBERG—While biologists have observed that this element forms the nucleus of the organism, it is a matter of heated debate exactly how much Cow DNA he has contributed to this new, hybrid, mutant strain. Furthermore, are the vocal stylings and lyrics meant to evoke laughter or fear? To epidemiologists, this question is largely academic: Either response is a form of submission to the infection.

Track Listing
1. Stabbed by an Angel
2. Cock Asia (mp3)
3. You d'etat
4. Break Up
5. Brooklyntown Romeo
6. Pillow Talk
7. Jaws of Life
8. Mr. Innocent
9. Through
10. The Obscenery
11. Harmonic Fix