One of Severed Heads' earliest releases, and the group's first vinyl full-length, Clean is filled with heavy, abrasive tape-loop pieces and ultra-trippy quasi-pop tunes. Tracks like "Food City" feature ticking drum machines and hypnotic synth arpeggios joined by sinister vocals and fuzz guitars drowning in effects, and as devilish as it all may seem, there's somehow an unmistakable sense of glee running through it all. The group delight in finding the strangest (and sometimes most awkward) vocal snippets to dismember and loop, and they also seem to get a huge kick out of juxtaposing prettiness with ugliness, attaching starry synth melodies to sludgy, hair-raising noise. There's absolutely no shortage of ideas on this album -- the Heads constantly bombard you with one grotesque, unfathomable sound after another -- and when something really sticks, they'll keep it around for a while and develop it into more of an actual song, like the debauched Kraftwerk-ian "Violins and Moonlight." While clearly reminiscent of what Cabaret Voltaire had been doing for nearly a decade at that point, and a direct precedent to bands like Skinny Puppy, Severed Heads' music was far more playful; this music never truly feels angry or nihilistic, just strange and fascinating. [Originally issued as an 11-track single LP, the album's contents have shifted and expanded through subsequent reissues. The 2020 edition contains nearly 80 minutes of material, including the original sequence plus live recordings, tracks from private cassettes, and unreleased goodies. These range from the self-explanatory "Clean Loops," a ten-minute collage of unprocessed loops mainly focusing on vocal samples, to the oddly tender "Somehow Pain."]
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