Best New Music: Rocky Mountain Toad – A Whole In The Sky

The intentional homonym in the title of this album is typical of the themes throughout. Duality, obscureness and holes. Track The Whole Of The Hole deals with the subject in most detail. Singer Toad explores the holes in our knowledge of holistic healing. If you treat the whole man will you heal the whole or are there holes in the science. Toad is unsure and dodges the issue instead by having the songs narrator attempt to hole up in a whole food store until the whole mess blows over. The album is obscurant, but effective as a whole.

It makes me excited to hear banjos played with such sheer bloody anger. The sound of snapping strings and necks marbles the album like fat through a beef steak. Death-country. It’s never been done, until now. Jim, I Wore A Noose Today and May The Bird Of Death Fly Up Your Rectum are real highlights. Something is happening in Slick Lizard, Alabama and I like it. The ugliness of singer Toad is unquestonable, but he makes the most of it by screaming his yodels. It’s electrifying. Recorded in an old abandoned stetson factory, A Whole In The Sky will scare the rhinestones from your nudie suit, but it’s a whole lot of fun.

Reviewed by Peter Ballast