Scotland's Baby Chaos are the great 90s band that no-one's heard, seemingly doomed to make sizzling rock and rock albums in a millennial era when the music business has decided that guitar-based rock and roll is dead. Their 1994 debut, the perhaps prophetically, definitely satirically entitled Safe Sex, Designer Drugs and The Death of Rock and Roll, was a high-strung, razor-barbed amalgam of post-punk, metal and glam-rock influences delivered with plenty of sass and a nihilistic viewpoint that made Baby Chaos stand apart from the then-current and now passe PC victim-rock of Pearl Jam and that ilk.
After a label switch from East/West to Atlantic, the Babies are back, and they're still packing plenty of punch. "When the season gets me down / I feel like kickin' things around" screams head baby Chris Gordon on "Kicking Things," a song that encapsulates the melodiously aggressive mood that pervades this album. There's an advanced sense of dynamics on display here, on songs like "Try Hard To Be Psychic" and "Pink" that continues to set Baby Chaos apart from the pack: they're tight in a way that a band can only achieve from years of playing together on the road.
This album burns from start to finish with a kind of existential remorse, the realization that the end of things, as Samuel Beckett once wrote, is inherent even in their beginnings, and yet we stagger on. The centerpiece track "Mental Bruising For Beginners," a dynamic riff-rocker that whirls through tempo changes and tosses in a few neo-metal riffs for good measure, epitomizes this view: "One day the door opened and I fell through / And who'd have thought that we could be like this so dead inside with no desire at all," Gordon laments. But what makes this band so enjoyable is that, however tragic their recognitions of life's basic predicament, they refuse to give in, and find a form of personal sovereignty in the Dionysian ecstasy of the moment, as on the title track: "Love your self abuse / It may be all you've got and if it is then that's your lot / so enjoy the sensation of your mental liberation and feel / a little better you deserve it you're a fucking star." Sentiments that would no doubt have met the approval of their fellow Scotsman, Aleister Crowley.
Love Your Self Abuse, then, is a rock album for those who remain unconvinced by all the "love and equality" communal crapola currently being spouted by the new hippie generation hiding under the misleading "electronica" moniker. "I've got a feeling that they're fucking with me / they're trying to drain me of my dignity" Gordon warns in "Ignoramus," sounding the same warning that Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground did back in a similar musical climate in the 1960s: namely, that all systems and ideologies, be they "alternative" or "mainstream," work to erode the sovereignty of the individual.
The best thing, then, is to play your cards close to the vest: "I confess to nothing" Gordon paradoxically declares here on the smoking "Confession of a Teenage Pervert." In a world full of snake-oil salesmen peddling the latest fashions and trendy philosophies, Baby Chaos continue to proudly go it alone.
