*** Eliades Ochoa

TRIBUTE TO CUARTETO PATRIA

(Higher Octave World)

The Cutthroats 9

THE CUTTHROATS 9

(Man's Ruin)

Unlike Helmet, who cleaned up nice, Unsane just stayed ugly and undanceable and sprawling -- if they were a metal band, they were the kind of metal band who could have sprung only from the gutters of the Lower East Side, noisy and uncouth and stumbling blindly through traffic. Their album covers were invariably gory car-wreck footage from some driver's-ed highway-safety film; their one MTV hit was three minutes of skateboarders eating concrete.

Still crazy after all these years, Unsane's Chris Spencer is back with a new band. The big difference is that Amphetamine Reptile and Touch & Go are no longer putting out half a dozen albums a year that sound exactly like this, so Spencer's yuck seems a little fresher than it used to. "Move" essays encroachment and suffocation, its abbreviated jackhammer-waltz tempos gurgling and swaying under the influence of some subterranean concrete Siren. "Can't Do a Thing" is a corporeal, dirty-South piss-blues variation on the Jesus Lizard's acid-scarred tumbleweed punk. There's even a little of Helmet's streamlined deco riff architecture. Oh, and lots of screaming. ("You should be dead! That's what they said!") It's perfectly quaint in its own way -- a token from that brief period of time five years ago when you could get away with unintelligibility, before metal got recontextualized into active rock and stoner blues, when there was still a niche for sick fellers with wild eyes and strange voices scraping at the insides of their scalps.

(The Cutthroats 9 play the Middle East next Thursday, November 30. Call 864-EAST.)

-- Carly Carioli