Lard “The Last Temptation of Reid” 1990. Alternative Tentacles. For whatever reason, Lard came up in conversation over the weekend and I realized I had never really listened to this punk-industrial supergroup (made up Jello Biafra from Dead Kennedys, Al Jourgensen, Paul Barker and Jeff Ward from Ministry) in any serious way so here is their first full length LP, The Last Temptation of Reid. As anticipated, it is loud, fast, angry, political and sonically edging on the high end of industrial metal.

The album’s lead track, “Forkboy” was, fittingly, included on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. “Pineapple Face” refers to Nicaraguan dictator Manuel Noriega who just prior to this record’s recording had been ousted during the US invasion of Panama in 1989 and was subsequently tried and sentenced in the US for drug trafficking and money laundering. Keeping a nice consistent evil-doer thread, the song “Sylvestre Matuschka” is about a Hungarian mass murderer from the 1930′s. “Can God Fill Teeth?” pokes at conspiracy theorists and feels even more poignant in 2016 (“Didn’t I just read/About how the cops are getting parents/To plant bugging devices/In their kids teeth/So if they disappear they can track ‘em/Before they wind up on the backs of milk cartons/And all that/ And didn’t I read/That these devices can go two-way/And everything that I do or say/Is all goin’ on tape somewhere right now”). The record concludes with an industrial-sized meat grinding cover of the manically creepy song “They’re Coming to Take Me Away,” originally performed by one-hit wonder Napoleon XIV (Jerry Samuels) in 1966. Samuels achieved the high-pitched insane vocals by using a VFO. Jello, of course, just sang it as Jello.