Alice Donut, Mule (Alternative Tentacles 1990)

By Null

Alice Donut have been one of my favorite bands for more than half my life. There is absolutely no other band on the planet like them. I have loved them from the time I bought my first Alice Donut CD in the college town of Iowa City and they have been blowing my mind ever since. Though I believe The Untidy Suicides of Your Degenerate Children may be their pinnacle of socially critical psychedelically deranged punk rock, I decided to review the album Mulebecause it was the first Alice Donut CD I bought, and it is a great place to start for those who have never experienced the Donut. But then I think, what about Revenge Fantasies of the Impotent or Bucketfuls of Meaninglessness and Horror in an Otherwise Meaningless Life? See, just the prospect of picking one album to review is problematic and difficult for me. 

Before we get into Mule, let me give you a little background. Alice Donut is a group of misfits from New York. Their first seven full-length albums were released on the great Alternative Tentacles record label and their last three albums were released on Howler records. Then they returned to Alternative Tentacles for the last full-length record they released. Their music is a blend of straight up rock, punk rock, and psychedelic noise landscapes that are frequently infused with often beautiful guitar strummed melodies. Most of their album covers depict grotesque cartoon characters illustrated by the lead singer Tomas. These same characters are usually drawn in Technicolor on the trench coat that is his live uniform. Alice Donut also have another mascot that frequents their album covers, a stubble faced man often dressed in women’s clothing. The lead singer has a very interesting voice, as he can sound like a screeching bug wailing with a sense of desperate vulnerability like a beetle scrambling for survival caught on a busy crosswalk in the heart of Manhattan’s rush-hour. Yes, he often sounds like a trapped bug, which fittingly echoes our little human lives in a vast universe in which we could be squashed at any moment. However, besides this sense of ultimate vulnerability, he is also able to sing in soft undertones that mirror a bittersweet loneliness, emotional desperation, and sadness. Alice Donut is a truly unique band. 

Mule opens with the track “Mother of Christ” which is a blistering rock tune where the singer wonders why “it sounds so ugly when he says what he feels.” What does he feel? He wants to know what it felt like to be the Virgin Mary during the moment of Immaculate Conception. It must have been great to be fucked by god, although most of us probably feel this every day. Here’s a sample:

Mother of Christ
I wanna feel what Mary felt (Mother of Christ)
I wanna feel what Mary felt (Mother of Christ)
when God spent his seed 

Mother of Christ
I wanna feel the messiah’s head (Mother of Christ)
against my confused virgin breast (Mother of Christ)
I wanna lactate sin free 

And I see the angel’s mighty sheath
And I feel the earth and heavens spread
And I see the skewered burning pit
And I feel the nugget of the seed

I’m the earth mother
I’m the virgin mother
Primordial mother
The virgin mother

And I feel the womb envy deep within
And I feel the holy conception
And I hear the groans of the damned
And I see the hymens ripped with sin

I’m the earth mother
The virgin mother
Primordial ooze 

I guess the question remains, was it consensual?

The next track is “Mrs. Hayes” and is a reoccurring theme that appears on many of Alice Donut’s subsequent albums: the subjugation of the female sex as a slave to patriarchal social norms. These female characters often have a moment of enlightenment many years later, and the result is often violent rebellion and vengeance. Over an angular repeating chord sequence, the story unfolds:

Mrs. Hayes
Takes a fork
And stabs in her husband’s neck
Rips his tongue
From his throat
And slashes at his fatty jowls
It’s just a dream
A drunken dream
but it makes her feel better
30 Years
Of wasted...life
Mr. Hayes
Lives alone
With his maid and cook

“Get over here!
Get over here!
Christ! You're an idiot!"
30 Years
Of wasted life
My small comfort when I go
When I go
Is he’ll be rotting in a home
A breathing corpse
Open casket Mr. Hayes
When I go
You...
...Gave...
...Me...
...NOTHING!!! 

Mrs. Hayes’s “drunken dream” is pale in comparison to her “30 years of wasted life,” and it is hard not to root for the slave. As Frantz Fanon states in Wretched of the Earth, when all other means of liberation are exhausted, the only hope for liberation is a knife at the master’s neck. Somehow, Alice Donut is able use humor and horror to paint a picture of reality that begs for this woman’s validation.

The grotesque cruelty between human beings found in many Alice Donut songs is not merely to entertain, but exists under a blanket illustrating how cruel human beings can be to one another when their orientation to the world is built upon a foundation of systematic dehumanization—this appeal to humanity becomes explicit through Alice Donut’s catalog and is further expanded in Mule itself.

“Mrs. Hayes” is followed by a mid tempo electric strumming beauty of more human isolation and alienation. The walls we build up between each other: “Roaches in the Sink.” 

Roaches in the sink, I’m cooking something dead
She’s holding my mistakes up over my head
I’m simmering my meal with utter patience
She’s screaming out bleeding verbal mutilations
A fed up Serbian kills Archduke Ferdinand
Unhinging the wrath of millions
Time to drink myself into
Oblivion
Stagger down the hall, open up the door
Ripped up photographs are scattered across the floor
Severed pieces of me
Pieces of my faulty personality
I walk inside the room, she’s staring hard in rage
With a stern moral expression
My future’s looking

Unpleasant

In the midst of this comic relief the music turns to whining melancholic guitars as the narrator sings:

I can’t afford this psychotic trauma pain thing
I can’t afford it anymore
I can’t afford the overwhelming weirdness

A murderous silence, she stares down at her feet
I take this as a cue, that I’m supposed to speak
In words of heartfelt conviction
And kneel before the priest
For my act of contrition

The next track is a little rocker: “Crawlpappy.” After all these years I am not sure what this song is about. A mushy priest? All I know is that at the end it is hard to take “the indignity of it all!”

Then we move to a remarkable tune, “My Severed Head,” philosophizing about death and the comedic accidental decapitation set to an amazing psychedelic rock grove and perfectly controlled feedback as the guitars move in and out of a melodic swirl of beautiful hues.

What if my...
Head were severed. By the gears...of a carbine
And it landed several feet from my convulsing twitching body
On the stump of my neck

It took seven minutes for the blood to drain
Would I be conscious, be conscious and able to see?

Initially, I’d be upset. For fucking up...in such a tremendous fashion
But I’d get easily distracted I’ve got a tendency toward sloth
Be a trooper, keep my chin up, Ponder something pointless

Am I my head or my body? Am I my body or my head? I think I’m more...
...attached to...my head emotionally

It’s horrible
The average death, In a hospital room Stuck on Frankenstein machine.
I hope I die in a freakish way, by an act of sheer stupidity. Something like...(2x)
Electric shaver in a bath tub
A lunchbox falling from a scaffold…drops twenty floors...and…crushes...
...me like an insect

Hilarious and brilliant.

If the album seems creative and brilliant at this point, the listener realizes that it has only just begun, as the next track “Bottom of the Chain” is a purely magnificent and super rocking Marxist critique of the dregs and disillusionment of the working class under capitalist hegemony and exploitation. The overt creativity and intellectual complexity of the Donut only now becomes evident. 

Repulsive furniture in a small home out in Queens
Spotted-tick-fever parents and their bat-wielding teens
Another murder, splattered across the news
Can’t wait till the flames engulf this city

Walk in the slaughterhouse for an 8-hour day
Walk out a butchered sow and crammed back in the train
I’m claustrophobic, so I stay close to the door
Get out at Essex, and start to transform
Into a human 

Here the narrator is reduced to nothing more than labor power, and like a cow being led to slaughter, he is dissembled and degraded, resulting in a loss of life.

I make your Xeroxes
(I know, I know)
I staple and I file
(I know, I know)
I’m going brain-dead
(I know, I know)
But I know what I’m worth,
Yeah I do

The head of my company doesn’t realize
That he’s expendable, it would still survive
But I’m the cannon fodder, the grease inside the wheel
I’m the nerve center, the achilles’ heel 

Indeed, the boss needs the narrator in order to produce surplus. And though the narrator’s life feels like “cannon fodder,” he is the “nerve center” at the center of the inhuman machine working, which is further examined in the next few lines:

And I’m the critical link
I’m the crucial link
I’m the weakest link
At the Bottom of the Chain
In the economy
(Weak link)
At the Bottom of the Chain
(Weak link)
In the economy
(Your link)
At the Bottom of the Chain...
(Bottom, bottom, bottom...) 

Though the narrator is the weakest link, which invokes the feeling of powerlessness, he is also the link that could break, disrupting the system, and bring down the entire thing. General strike, anyone?

An unimportant cell of an apathetic whole
Fractured, uninterested, without any goals
I like to drink a beer, stare out into the streets
Smoke some cigarettes, cook something to eat
Waiting for the city to burn 

The narrator’s life is filled with the mundane tasks of survival as he regenerates his strength and ability to return to work and surrender even more hours of his life. His only real dream of freedom is imagining the whole fucking system burning to the ground. The beast cannot be reformed. 

I’ve made no impact
(I know, I know)
On this mass culture
(I know, I know)
I’m going braindead
(I know, I know)
But I rule this earth
Yeah, I do
‘Cause when I collate
(I know, I know)
The masses tremble
(I know, I know)
And when I send a fax
(I know, I know)
The universe shudders at my fury

And I’m the critical link
I’m the crucial link
I’m the weakest link
At the Bottom of the Chain 

The song fades out with the chorus, ending side one.

The album continues with more sardonic, grotesque, and tragically comedic masterpieces, laced with some of the greatest guitar textures and grooves ever put on wax. It continues with a portrait of U.S. obesity in the song “Big Ass.” The lamentations of a child pleading for the life of a squirrel from the back seat of a car can be heard in “Roadkill.” By the middle of side two, we find a tender and hopeless acoustic ballad in the song, “Tiny Ugly World.” I played this song for a friend while I was attending the University of Iowa back in the early 1990s, and it had such an effect on him that he wrote all the lyrics on the back of his jean jacket. The Donut can have this kind of emotional power on a person, as they are much more complex than might be apparent at first listen.

As we get near the end of the album, the masterpiece “J Train Downtown: A Nest of Murder” feels like an appendage to “Bottom of the Chain,” in that it paints a comical, claustrophobic and nightmarish scene of riding a crowed New York City subway to work. At the end of the song the subway doors open and,

The insects spew

Caesarian birth

From a festering womb

Then we all flock out together, feeling perky

Headed towards the...Slaughterhouse

The album closes with a song called, “Cows Placenta To Armageddon.” Yes, it is as crazy as it sounds. A mutating virus turns people into grotesque forms, ultimately resulting in Armageddon. I’ll let you pick up the album and read the lyrics, as this album and this band are beyond description. The music is often beautiful and heartbreaking and serious and funny and tragic and…all of that. In addition, I must stress again, Alice Donut albums contain some of the best guitar riffs and textures of any album, anywhere. Every musician brings a distinct personality and style to the band. They are one of the best, hands down. 


I have seen Alice Donut three times: in a basement of a residential house Davenport, Iowa, in 1991, in San Francisco at an actual music venue in 1996, and in a nearly empty classroom on the Colorado State University campus in Fort Collins in 1992 (I think). While I was seeing them in the basement of a house in Iowa, there was a moment where Tomas, the lead singer, gave me the mic so I could sing the famous, “Oh Really?” line from the song “Lisa’s Father.” It remains one of my favorite memories, ever. Rarely do we get a band this good and this complex. All of their Alternative Tentacles albums are absolutely brilliant. Get them all, but Mule is a great place to start.