Providence, RI, garbage-artisan savant Russian Tsarlag (a.k.a. Carlos Gonzales) should need no introduction at this point--he's been trucking his moldy fruit cart of sewage-pop and bad acid storytelling across the American wasteland since longer than most people have had an email account. Yet over the past few years his uniquely zombified scrapheap songcraft has fermented into its ripest and most reflective forms, none more so than his latest bleach blanket odyssey, Gagged in Boonesville. The album tells the sordid tale of a huge tenement apartment building whose residents are mentally poisoned by an ancient poster of Medusa haunting the basement, not to mention the unruly pack of rabies-stricken stray dogs living in the courtyard. (Shit's pretty bleak in Boonesville, clearly.) Given the backstory, it's fitting that the LP's nine tracks traverse a more melancholy, meditative dimension of the Tsarlag multiverse: dumpster-scrounged fifth-generation new-wave demos ("Gagged in Boonesville," "Play This Tape Again"), homeless mutant campfire dirges ("This Waltz"), cyborg-mumbling depressive ambience ("Become Solid"), even a cockroach-covered piano ballad ("Island of Lost Souls"). It's all here, echoing down the derelict stairwells--another fascinating, unclassifiable chapter in the Neverending Story of Tsarlag. Read it or weep.
